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Copyright © Jean Stubbs, 2007

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Reinventing MeccaTobacco in the Dominican Republic, 1763-20071

Jean Stubbs(Caribbean Studies Centre, London Metropolitan University)

It was a crowning moment for Dominican tobacco when in 2003, in the city of Santiago de losCaballeros, regional capital of the Cibao central valley, Grupo León Jimenes celebrated thecentenary of La Aurora cigar factory with the opening of the state-of-the-art Centro Cultural‘Eduardo León Jimenes’and publication of the book Huella y memoria: E. León Jimenes: unsiglo en el camino nacional, 1903-2003.2 The book divides company history in four periods,each of which coincides with an accepted periodisation of Dominican tobacco history duringthe century in question.

The first (1903-29) saw the rise of manufacturing, in cigars and then cigarettes, intandem with agriculture and industry in the Cibao, and especially Santiago. It was in thisperiod that León Jimenes oversaw the growth of La Aurora into one of the DominicanRepublic’s two largest tobacco companies, profiting from mechanised cigarettemanufacturing for the regional and national market, while also continuing hand-rolled cigarproduction. The second (1930-61, and particularly after 1945) witnessed stagnation of thecompany and the region under the state monopoly of Compañía Anónima del Tabaco (CAT),better known as La Tabacalera, of General Rafael Leónidas Trujillo. Despite León’s death in 1937, the business continued in family hands, but it was not until after Trujillo that LaAurora’s fortunes improved. This post-Trujillo third period (1962-82) saw the renewedexpansion of the company in primarily cigarettes (and the national beer, Presidente), with LaAurora successfully undercutting CAT. Such was León Jimenes’ssuccess that President JuanBosch, during his ephemeral time in power (1962-63), celebrated the company as a model ofprogress. This expansion was strengthened in the fourth period (1982-2003). The renewedexpansion in cigars, especially in the 1990s, accompanied the Cibao’s new positioning in theglobal cigar export market–particularly in the US. As the company grew, so also its bankingand philanthropic interests–hence the new Cultural Centre, founded:

to nourish creativity through research, conservation, exhibition and disseminationof all Dominican artistic and cultural manifestations, as well as all that maycontribute to nurturing a society that is conscious of its most transcendental

1 The material in this paper has been drawn from my forthcoming monograph on the island and offshore Havana cigar,1862-2007, the research for which was funded by London Metropolitan University, the British Academy, RockefellerScholarships at the University of Puerto Rico & Florida International University, and a Visiting Fellowship at theRoyal Institute of Linguistics & Anthropology, Leiden. I am particularly grateful to the following colleagues forcontributing to and facilitating this research: Roberto Cassá (National Archive, Santo Domingo); Rafael Emilio Yuñen& Iturbides Zaldívar Luna (Eduardo León Jimenes Cultural Centre, Santiago de los Caballeros); Ramona Hernández& Sarah Aponte (Dominican Studies Centre, New York); Humberto García (Caribbean Institute, University of PuertoRico); Jorge Duany (Centre for Social Research, University of Puerto Rico); & Max Castro (formerly of the North-South Centre, University of Miami). For their hospitality and stimulating thoughts, my special thanks to Lynne Guitartin Santiago de los Caballeros; Elsy Doñe Molina in Santo Domingo; Constance Sutton, Antonio Lauria & PamelaScorn in New York.2 José Alcántara Almánzar & Ida Hernández Caamaño, Huella y memoria: E. León Jimenes: un siglo en elcamino nacional, 1903-2003, Santo Domingo: Grupo León, 2003.

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values, proud of itself, and capable of assuming an active role in impoving thequality of life in the country. 3.

Emblematic as it is of Dominican twentieth and early twenty-first century cigar tobacco, theLeón Jimenes story would be incomplete without reference to the little-explored connectionbetween Dominican and Cuban tobacco history, which is the objective of this paper. The title‘Reinventing mecca’ refers to the period after the 1959 Cuban Revolution, when US andémigré Cuban tobacco interests combined to project the Dominican Republic as the home ofquality tobacco, including famous Havana cigar brands. The US quest for alternative leaftobacco sources after the 1960 US embargo on trade with Cuba, coupled with the exodus ofCuban tobacco families –a key number of whom found their way to the Cibao –produced adramatic post-1959 shift in Dominican tobacco history. This was augmented with Cuba’s post-1989 crisis, as the East European socialist bloc disintegrated and Cuba’s tobacco plummeted in both quantity and quality, though both have recovered since.4

In exploring the full significance of the post-1959 Dominican shift, the paper firstprovides an overview of Havana cigar history by way of contextualising Dominican tobaccohistory. Turning to the Dominican Republic, the initial focus is on the ‘long tobacco century’(1763-1930), in tandem with developments in Cuba. By the mid-nineteenth century, Cuba hadbecome the international standard for premium cigars and cigar tobacco, but saw this severelyundercut during the 1868-98 independence struggles and subsequent US occupation andinvestment. The 1930-61 dominance of Trujillo and La Tabalacera follows almost as aninterlude prior to two key periods: 1962-92, during which the seeds were (literally) sown forCuban-type Dominican leaf to replace embargoed Cuban leaf on the US market, overtakingCuban production and export levels in leaf in the late 1970s and cigars by the late 1980s; and1992-2007, when Cuban-Dominican cigars dominated on the US market, also competingaggressively with Cuban cigars on the global market. The whole post-1961 period is then re-examined in the context of the Cuban influx to the Cibao and the Dominican exodus from theCibao to New York.

The paper concludes by revisiting Dominican tobacco history as interpreted byscholars, especially the longue durée approach to ‘Dominican exceptionalism’ and the peasantry, stemming from the late nineteenth-century vision of Dominican patriot PedroFrancisco Bonó.5 The debate centres around the ‘patriotic’, ‘democratic’Cibao, with itsautonomous tobacco peasantry contrasting with the plight of the dispossessed in theexpansion of oligarchic cacao and imperialist sugar–a vision formed during the period whenCuban leaf and cigars became the world standard and which predated by almost a century thecontrapuntal vision of Cuban tobacco and sugar by Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz.6 The

3 Centro Cultural Eduardo León Jimenes, Inaugural Brochure, 2003, p.3. The Centre, with its galleries,multimedia library, 200-seat auditorium, creative arts workshop, and cigar heritage area, also projected aCaribbean heritage, such that when it opened it was described by CARIFORUM as a model institution for theCaribbean, as well as the Dominican Republic, furthering mutual knowledge and thereby contributing toCaribbean integration. See Cariforum Cultural Review of the Caribbean, Special Edition Centro León: a culturalspace for the Caribbean, No 11, October, 2003.4 The 1990s developments are charted in Jean Stubbs, ‘Turning Over a New Leaf? The Havana Cigar Revisited’, New West Indian Guide, 74:3 & 4 (December 2000).5 For Bonó, see Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (ed.), Papeles de Pedro Francisco Bonó: para la historia de la ideasen políticas en la República Dominicana, Santo Domingo: Editorial del Caribe, 1964.6 Fernando Ortiz, Cuban Counterpoint: Tobacco and Sugar, Philadelphia, Penn: Temple University Press, 1995[1940].

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Dominican exodus from the Cibao to New York is an ending which resonates as a twenty-firstcentury Bonó-type lament for the plight of the dispossessed, but this time in tobacco itself –Bonó’s vision of tobacco having all but dissipated.

The Cuban-Dominican tobacco connection7

The Havana cigar is a commodity that for over a century and a half has been at the heart ofpolitical and economic rivalries, linked with foreign and local capital and labour, and without-migration at key turning points in Cuban history. Late nineteenth-century independenceand the 1959 revolution created Cuban communities and economies abroad, centred oncommodities like tobacco. These in turn came to constitute serious competition for, while alsobeing interlocked with, island production. Today, as in the past, parallel production andmarketing systems of identical or similar brands, and the cultural and labour practicesassociated with them, raise issues of identity and reconciliation, in the context of bothpolitical nationalism and economic pragmatism, and cut across imperial and neo-imperialboundaries.

Cuban tobacco was developed with Spanish, German, British and French capital, forEuropean, North American and world markets. Vuelta Abajo, in Cuba’s westernmost province of Pinar del Río, became known as the tobacco mecca for the Havana cigar, which inturn became the centre around which revolved a nineteenth-century world cigar tobaccoeconomy whose key retail outlets were London, Amsterdam, Bremen and New York. Thebackdrop to Cuba’s First and Second Wars of Independence from Spain (1868-78 and 1895-98) was an out-migration to the United States (notably Florida and New York), the Caribbean,Mexico and Central America, and across the Atlantic, notably Spain and its outlying CanaryIslands, where there were bi-directional migration flows. In the overseas settler territories,Cuban tobacco interests came together, providing a familiar means of livelihood and aneconomic and political mainstay for the independence struggle at home. Over time, rivaleconomic and political interests built up, often with trading and other advantages over thehome country in turmoil. At the turn of the century, US capital investment in tobacco on theisland came fast, swallowing up tracts of Cuban tobacco land and major manufacturingcompanies. There were ‘independents’ who held out, but the industry as a whole never regained its former glory, and the 1930s depression and labour unrest culminated a processwhereby US-owned manufacturing withdrew from Cuba to the United States.

The migratory phenomenon re-emerged after the 1959 revolution, and new Cubantobacco ‘host communities’ grew up in Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuador, Brazil and the Dominican Republic, as well as Florida and New Jersey in the US and the Canary Islands inSpain. Smaller manufacturers, dealers, growers and workers proved to be as astute as largermonopoly capital in finding fertile ground for overseas business. They profited from the post-1959 internal economic upheaval in Cuba that was the product of insurrection, agrarianreform and nationalisation, plus the tight trade embargo that was the political response of the

7 The first five paragraphs of this section have been reproduced, with minor editorial changes, from Jean Stubbs,‘Tobacco in the Contrapunteo: Ortiz and the Havana Cigar’, in Mauricio A. Font & Alfonso W. Quiroz (eds), Cuban Counterpoints: The Legacy of Fernando Ortiz, Lanham, MD.: Lexington, 2004. See also, ‘Reflections on Class, Race, Gender and Nation in Cuban Tobacco: 1850-2000’, in Constance Sutton (ed.), RevistingCaribbean Labor: Essays in Honour of O. Nigel Bolland, Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle, 2005; ‘Political Idealism and Commodity Production: Cuban Tobacco in Jamaica, 1870-1930’, Cuban Studies, 25 (1995), pp.51-81; and, Tobacco on the Periphery: A Case Study in Cuban Labour History, l860-1958, Cambridge: CambridgeUniversity Press, l985.

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United States (and for a while the whole area) to the Cuban revolution. Western Europeanmarkets became a battleground for disputed Havana cigar brands. At the same time, theEastern European bloc and key Third World countries emerged as strong Havana cigarpartners.

A new chapter opened when the demise of the Eastern European socialist bloc in 1989signalled the end of Cuba’s special trade and aid. At the same time, the United States took steps to tighten and extraterritorialise the embargo in the form of the 1991 Torricelli and 1996Helms-Burton Acts. As external geopolitical realities compounded internal weaknesses ofboth an economic and political nature, the Cuban revolutionary government devised astructural adjustment strategy, courting non-US trade and investment. The Havana cigarbecame a key player in the Cuban strategy for the 1990s, with international court battles overmarket brand names –the more visible tip of a cigar war. At the same time a US anti-anti-smoking cigar revival gained momentum, involving the two US cigar giants –Connecticut-based General Cigar and Fort Lauderdale-based Consolidated Cigar –along with émigréCuban tobacco interests, in the Dominican Republic especially, followed by Honduras,Nicaragua, Ecuador and Brazil, in all-out competition with island Cuba.

As of the late 1980s, the state-owned Cuban tobacco sector blazed the internaladjustment trail with the disaggregation of tobacco land from cooperatives back into privatesmallholdings. In 1994, part-dollar payments were introduced as an incentives package for thetobacco sector, and a new holding company, Habanos SA, was set up to handle overseasmarketing ventures. Both measures followed fast in the wake of two landmark ‘credit for tobacco’ deals struck between the Cuban state tobacco enterprise, Cubatabaco, and its French and Spanish parastatal tobacco counterparts - Societé Nationale des Tabacs (SEITA) andTabacalera Española, SA. A European cigar marketing deal was struck in Britain withHunters & Frankau. By 1997, Cuba was investing heavily in tobacco to meet a world marketdemand in excess of supply. Heightened US-Europe rivalry was mirrored by that within theHavana cigar universe. A new twist came in 1999 when Tabacalera Española and SEITAformed Altadis (Alianza de Tabacos y Distribución), which bought 50 percent shares inHabanos SA. Tabacalera Española had earlier in the year bought Consolidated Cigar Co. andsubsequently created Altadis USA. The company was thereby heavily involved in both theisland and overseas Havana cigar business, especially in the Dominican Republic, where itssubsidiary company is today Tabacalera García.

Parallel production and marketing systems of identical brand names, in and outsideCuba, involving island and émigré Cubans, for non-US and US markets, clearly poseeconomic and political challenges for any eventual normalisation of relations between Cubaand the United States and reconciliation between tobacco interests on and off the island.However, the historical interconnections among the various cigar economies are more far-reaching than might appear at first glance.

There are the tobacco histories of territories closely interlocked with Cuba, due to out-and in-migration at key moments in Cuban history. In the US, the better known of thesehistories are those of Tampa and Key West, the lesser known that of Gadsden County, inFlorida. Their tobacco history, which began with Cuba’s 1868-78 war of independence, wasboosted by a first US embargo on Cuba in the 1890s and ended with the second embargo ofthe 1960s. Less known are the Cuban tobacco histories of Jamaica and, in Spain, the CanaryIslands. Then there are the closely interconnected tobacco histories of Cuba, Puerto Rico andthe United States. Cuban and Puerto Rican cigar makers populated New York in thenineteenth century; the 1898 US occupations of Cuba and Puerto Rico paved the way for

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massive inflows of tobacco capital; and Puerto Rican (following Jamaican) migrant labourerstoiled in the fields of Connecticut in the latter part of the twentieth century, growing tobaccoderived from Cuban seed. Today, there is virtually nothing left of cigar tobacco in the UnitedStates, Jamaica, the Canary Islands or Puerto Rico, as company investment has relocatedgrowing and manufacture, part of the recent wave of globalisation, following a trail blazed bya catalyst group of Cuban émigrés to the Dominican Republic, Nicaragua, Honduras, Ecuadorand Brazil,.

It is a history I have come to conceptualise as a new counterpoint, no longer Ortiz’sCuban Counterpoint of Tobacco and Sugar, but rather a counterpoint between island and off-island Cuban tobacco.8 There is a mirror image of this in the Dominican Republic and thework of Pedro Francisco Bonó, whose thinking, like that of Ortiz in the case of Cuba,permeated a renewed Dominican scholarly interest in tobacco and the Cibao, part of a widerflourishing of post-Trujillo scholarship. Such was the renewed interest in tobacco thatDominican historian Antonio Lluberes Navarro described it in 1984 as the most studied sectorof the Dominican economy after sugar.9 The Dominican Republic was equally under focus forthe explosion of out-migration to the United States from the 1960s on, and especially duringthe 1980s and 1990s. This exodus –demonstrably linked to US-Dominican political events,economic and migration policies, and rural impoverishment –has only in a few studies beendirectly linked to tobacco.10

Strikingly, while there has been some comparative study of Cuba and the DominicanRepublic, there has been none with a tobacco focus. Yet Napoleón Padilla’s evocatively titled

8 This is explored in Stubbs (2004).9 Antonio Lluberes Navarro, ‘La crisis del tabaco cibaeño 1879-1930’, in Antonio Lluberes, José del Castillo &Ramón Albuquerque (eds), Tabaco, azúcar y minería, Santo Domingo: Banco de Desarrollo Interamericano,1984. Lluberes wrote a series of articles on Dominican tobacco in EME-EME Estudios Dominicanos: ‘La economía del tabaco en el Cibao en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’, 1: 4 (Jan-Feb 1974), pp.35-60; ‘Las rutas del tabaco dominicano’, 4:21 (Nov-Dec 1975). pp. 3-22; ‘Tabaco y catalanes en Santo Domingo’, 5:28 (Jan-Feb1977), pp. 13-26; ‘El tabaco dominicano: de la manufactura al monopolio industrial’, 6:35 (March-April 1978),pp. 3-27. See also: Paul Mutto,‘Desarrollo de la economía de exportación en la República Dominicana, 1900-1930’, EME-EME Estudios Dominicanos, 25 (Nov-Dec 1974); Nancie González ‘El cultivo del tabaco en la República Dominicana’, Revista Ciencia, 2:4 (Oct-Dec 1975); Fernando I. Ferran, Tabaco y Sociedad: laorganización del poder en el ecomercado de tabaco dominicano, Santo Domingo: Fondo para el Avance de lasCiencias Sociales, 1976;Frank Moya Pons, ‘La economía dominicana y el partido azul’, EME-EME 28, (Jan-Feb1977); Iturbídes Zaldívar Luna, Producción y comercialización de tabaco negro en la República Dominicana,Santiago de los Caballeros: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1979; Harry Hoetink,‘El Cibao, 1844-1900:Su aportación a la formación social de la República’, EME-EME Estudios Dominicanos, 8:48 (May-June 1980);Bernardo Vega,‘Tabaco e historia’, EME EME, 10:57 (Nov-Dec 1981); Michiel Baud, Peasants and Tobaccoin the Dominican Republic, 1870-1930, Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1996; Pedro L. San Miguel,Los campesinos del Cibao: economía de mercado y transformación agraria en la República Dominicana, 1880-1960, Río Piedras: Editorial de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1997; Esteban Rosario, Trujillo y la tabacalera,Santo Domingo: Amigo del Hogar, 2004. Of particular interest is Compañía Anónima Tabacalera Museo delTabaco,‘Guión para la motivación y presentación del Museo’, Mimeo, 30 May 1982, a three-part study for awell-thought out little tobacco museum that functioned in Santiago in the 1990s, authored by Zaldívar, RafaelEmilio Yunén (later to become director of the León Jimenes Cultural Centre) & Danilo de los Santos. Moregeneral historical works include Rafael Emilio Yunén La isla como es: Hipótesis para su comprobación,Santiago: Universidad Católica Madre y Maestra, 1985; Roberto Cassá, Historia social y económica de laRepública Dominicana, 2 vols., Santo Domingo: Punto y Aparte Editores, 2 vols. 1977-1980; 2 vols. 1982-1983.10 See: Max Castro, ‘Dominican Journey: Patterns, Context, and Consequences of Migration from the DominicanRepublic to the United States’, PhD dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1985; Fernando I.Ferrán & Patricia Pessar,‘Dominican Agriculture and the Effects of International Migration’,in AnthonyMaingot (ed.), Small Country Development and International Labour Flows, Boulder: Westview Press, 1991;Gabriela Sandoval, ‘“Y en el campo se está respirando pobreza”: Survival and Global Economic Integrationofthe Dominican Tobacco Sector’, Paper presented to LASA, Washington, Sep 6-8 2001.

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Memorias de un cubano sin importancia is highly suggestive regarding the centrality of Cubato developments in post-1959 Dominican tobacco.11 By then retired and living in Miami,Padilla recounted his life as a Cuban tobacco agronomist who left Cuba in 1960 in oppositionto the revolutionary agrarian reforms, worked helping build up the Cibao’s Instituto del Tabaco (INTABACO) in the early 1960s, and returned to the Dominican Republic in later lifefor the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation. Four years after publication ofPadilla’s book, Cigar Aficionado (a cigar lovers’glossy life-style magazine launched in NewYork in 1992) began to run informative feature articles on companies and personalities in thecontemporary cigar world, involving, quite prominently, Cubans in the contemporaryDominican Republic. Hence this incursion into Cuban-Dominican tobacco history.

The long tobacco century (1763-1930)

Raymundo González wrote of the Dominican largo siglo campesino (long peasant century),from 1763 to 1930, contrasting this with Cuba and Puerto Rico where plantations were fastexpanding.12 The long peasant century applied especially to the central Cibao, where tobaccopredominated, in contrast to plantation sugar in the south and east.

Tobacco, of course, predated 1763. Indeed, a pioneering place in the history oftobacco growing by European settlers in the Americas has been claimed by Dominicanhistorians for Hispaniola in 1531 (Cuba following in 1580, Brazil in 1600, Virginia in 1612,and Maryland in 1631), and tobacco from Hispaniola is recorded as having been the first toreach Spain after the Spanish Conquest. However, because of tobacco contraband with theEnglish, French and Dutch on the north and east coasts, in 1605 Felipe III ordered settlementsto be destroyed, and people and livestock to be moved to the centre and south. The colonywent into further decline when Spanish interest turned more to the mines of Mexico and Peru,enabling the French to take the western part of the island. Tobacco developed despite Spanishmercantile control, as subsistence farmers traded with French St Domingue. By the earlyeighteenth century, there were also companies trading in tobacco, the Governor of Santiago in1721 having requested royal permission to sell tobacco to St Domingue, accepting payment inslaves to increase production, given the labour shortage in the Cibao.

In the eighteenth century the Spanish introduced the Estanco del Tabaco, setting upsubsidiaries of Reales Fábricas de Tabacos de Sevilla in Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Venezuela andthe Philippines. It was 1763 when they did so in Santo Domingo, the year Havana was underBritish occupation, to buy leaf through funds located in the Reales Cajas de México. TheFactoría was not functional until 1770 and had a short and chequered existence until itsending in 1796. There was also conflict. By 1771, growers were protesting about the lowprices of Spanish official buyers, forcing a price increase in 1773, after which crop surplusesled to planting restrictions in 1778.13 Such was the opposition that growers were againallowed to sell inferior quality tobacco to St Domingue in return for money or slaves.

After the end of the Factoría in 1796 and the Haitian Revolution of 1791-1804, whenthe Dominican colonial economy plunged into crisis, the Cibao tobacco economy might havebeen wiped out had it not been for the early policies of the Haitian occupying governments to

11 Napoleón S. Padilla, Memorias de un cubano sin importancia, Hialeah: A. C. Graphics, 1998.12 Raymundo González, ‘Ideología del progreso y campesinado en el siglo XIX”, Ecos, 1:2 (1993), pp.25-43.13 This was also the decade of the tobacco growers’ revolt in Cuba, 1777.

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free slaves, redistribute land, and allow free trade with new markets. The year 1805 saw thefirst Haitian invasion of the eastern part of the island, and many rich white colonos left whenHaitian President Boyer incorporated the east into Haiti in 1822. As they abandoned thecountryside, tobacco growing was left to former peons and slaves, and their families, and thusa tobacco peasantry of poor whites and coloureds formed. González cites evidence to suggestthat the poor sympathised with the aims of the new black republic, but differences in languageand religion, and Africanisation, were anathema to elites, who were primarily white,European and Catholic; and later, it is recorded, the masses themselves were inspired torebellion and independence in 1844.

That year, tobacco was arguably the most stable and productive sector of theeconomy, from which derived the economic, social and political importance of the Cibao.Trade routes opened through the north coast ports of Monte Cristi and Puerto Plata toterritories in the Caribbean (St. Thomas, Puerto Rico, Curaçao, Martinique), the UnitedStates, Spain, France, and Germany. As early as 1811, virtually all tobacco was beingexported to Europe through Puerto Plata, with France and Spain being the main buyers, butwith growing markets in Holland and Germany, especially the latter.

Quality Dominican tobacco is known to have been used as wrapper for Cuban cigars,causing a French diplomat to write in 1849: “The tobacco leaf of Santo Domingo has a better taste and looks more pleasant than other kinds, and offers a perfect elasticity and goodstrength”.14 The Cibao became a tobacco-growing and processing area, with small-scalemanufacture of andullo (pressed or plug tobacco), cigars and cigarettes, serones (bags) andthread, and breeding of pack animals. According to Ferrán, Dominican tobacco competedsuccessfully against Cuban tobacco in Spain in terms of quality. Thus, the Captain General ofSanto Domingo wrote to the King of Spain praising Dominican tobacco and proclaiming itsuperior to that of Cuba.. In 1860, the Spanish Consul, Mariano Álvarez, complained theGermans would buy Dominican tobacco and manufacture cigars that they sold like ‘Habana cigars’, but at very low prices.

By the early 1870s, tobacco exports were far greater than those of sugar, coffee, cacao,and mahogany; and Germany had a virtual market monopoly, Dominican tobacco imports toHamburg alone increasing twelve-fold over 1864-1972. Why Germany? Hamburg andBremen had begun trading in the Caribbean through St Thomas and were well placed at thetime of Dominican independence. In the case of tobacco, most European countries had eitherstate monopolies, and/or were supplied through their own colonies in the Americas and Asia,while in Germany there was free trade.

During 1888-97, exports of sugar doubled, cacao and coffee quadrupled, but tobaccodeclined. This has been attributed to four determining factors: lack of agrotechnology; theeconomic development of the country with foreign capital as of 1870; the internationalmarket, especially Germany, which was the main buyer for tobacco; and Dominican statepolicy.

Much has been made of the deteriorating quality of Dominican leaf in the late-nineteenth century. Samuel Hazard noted that Dominican tobacco was poorer in quality than

14 Quoted in Michiel Baud, ‘La gente del tabaco: Villa Gonzalez en el siglo veinte’, Ciencia y Sociedad, 9:1(1984), p.11.

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that of Cuba, not because of the quality of the land but the lack of attention and knowedge.15

That year, eight importers in Hamburg and Altona wrote complaining about the lack ofquality classification. Lluberes noted:“Since the colonial period, the quality of the Cibao leaf has been spoken of, and its natural similarity to the Cuban leaf, but it was not handled well”.16

Attempts were made to rectify this, as evidenced in El Eco del Pueblo of 14 January1883, which reported on La Sociedad‘El Progreso’de Santiago contracting Cubans to adviseon seeds and new strains. Regulations were brought in for growing and exporting, exportduties reduced, and franchises awarded to establish model tobacco farms –many of whichfailed and were withdrawn. Later:

The Cuban War of Independence (1895-98) gave a small boost to Dominicantobacco, since it was thought it might replace Cuban tobacco on the Americanmarket. It was a passing illusion. The American occupation of Cuba and PuertoRico following the Hispanic-American War meant the introduction of capitalistinterests in the tobacco economies of these countries. Leaf varieties wereimproved, as were growing conditions; but above all the respective tobaccoeconomies became even more tied to the American market.17

According to a 1909 Secretaría de Agricultura report:

in the Republic there is no lack of good tobacco seed, and certain farmers,cultivating and exploiting this well, have succeeded in selling their tobacco asthough it were from Vuelta Abajo, and it has been consumed as though it camefrom there. But in general there has not been the same level of care.18

Tobacco production quadrupled between 1870 and 1930, albeit with a slowing down in1880-1900 and some extreme year-to-year fluctuations linked to political events, inclementweather (in the absence of technology and irrigation), and the market. In 1879, a major crisisdeveloped when the German government, in a protectionist move for home-grown tobacco,more than doubled tobacco import duties. Market-oriented growers switched to cacao, untilcacao lost out in the twentieth century to competition from West Africa. Through the late-nineteenth century, however, small firms operated in rural areas; entire communities engagedin collecting and weaving palm fibre for the serones; and some 90,000 mules each carried twoserones, before the decline in animal transport with the completion of the Cibao railroads –Santiago-Sanchez in 1881 (twenty years later extended to the capital) and Santiago-PuertoPlata in 1897. Along the railroads emerged important tobacco towns such as Villa Gonzálezand Navarrete.

The German market continued to be predominant, but France, Holland, the FrenchAntilles, Spain and other markets were also of significance. World War I closed the Germanmarket completely, and with US occupation (1916-24) the US paid special attention toagriculture in the form of experimental stations and technification, and took almost all the

15 Samuel Hazard, Santo Domingo: Past and Present with a glance at Hayti, Santo Domingo: Editorial de SantoDomingo, 1982 [1873].16 Lluberes (1984), p.13. Editor’s translation from the Spanish, as all other quotes that follow and were originally in Spanish.17 Lluberes (1984), p.16.18 ‘Memoria del Ministro de Agricultura e Inmigración, R, Tejera, al presidente R. Caceres’, Santo Domingo, 22 February 1909, Gaceta Oficial 1991, 11 May 1909, p.20.

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tobacco for its own consumption or re-export to Europe, at increased prices. After the war,Germany began to recover predominance, and prices and production dropped.

The late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries saw a huge increase in USinvestment, primarily in the south –in sugar and mining (aluminium and nickel) –and to alesser extent in the north –in bananas, but also in tobacco. World War I brought priceincreases between 1915 and 1919, and during the US occupation of 1916-24 there were UScompanies with buyers in Santiago, including Tropical Tobacco Co., and Cullman Bros, ofNew York. In this period, Cuba was also importing Dominican tobacco, with buyers includingAlfredo F. Pellerano, for the Eminencia factory in Havana, and Francisco Lavandero y Cía,for Havana Tobacco Company brands La Legitimidad, Susini, Henry Clay, Pedro Murías, Finde Siglo, and others.

After the war, soaring profits were to be made by exporters in the short-lived ‘Dance of the Millions’ whenhigh prices led to a furia de tabaco (tobacco mania), to the detriment offood-crop production. In the crisis of 1920, Cibao exporters tried to convince the US militarygovernment to grant Dominican tobacco preferential access to the US market, but the USintent to modernise a semicolony did not extend to favouring a competitor to Americantobacco growers. The military government did, however, guarantee a minimum price for the1920 and 1921 harvests.

The 1920s recovery of European economies stimulated the tobacco trade, and from1923 Belgium, Germany, France and Holland were the four largest buyers of Dominicantobacco. Companies from those countries became established in the Cibao, alongsidecompanies attracted from the US under the occupation. The Tropical Tobacco Company wasset up and expanded, acquiring interests in CAT and manufacturing their own cigarettes inSantiago. The Dutch Curaçaose Handelsmaatschappij (Curaçao Trading Company) started tobuy large quantities, as did Dutch merchant Hugo Scheltema, representing CompañíaDominicana de Tabacos. The Spanish Tabacalera began to buy Dominican tobacco on aregular basis, through its own permanent representative in the Cibao, and the FrenchCompanie Génèrale des Tabacs, through Albert Oquets. Together with the Santiago firm of V.F. Thomen, they determined prices and set market trends, overshadowing the two remainingrepresentatives of German importers: Schulze and Lembcke, and G. A. Luening. In effect, theinternational market moved into the Cibao, buying, processing and shipping directly, withmodern processing techniques and commercial practice. By 1930, however, tobacco exportswere in fourth place, after sugar, cacao and coffee, representing only 6 percent of totalexports; and exports were subsequently adversely affected by the Spanish Civil War andoutbreak of World War II.

Internally, the demand for tobacco had led to an ever more complex trading systemwith several levels of intermediaries, often advancing credit, often under contract. This waseven more marked in the early-twentieth century, with buoyant world market prices and theemergence of a regional tobacco industry, new technology facilitating mass cigaretteproduction and leading to a vertical integration of agriculture and industry. The 1920s, underthe Horacio Vasquez government, saw attempts to modernise agriculture, includingexperimentation with seed selection (including from Cuba), new tobacco-curing sheds, andirrigation, though large-scale irrigation for rice displaced much tobacco land. In 1923, thestate intervened to buy tobacco; agricultural modernisation was again taken up under HoracioVasquez in 1924, with the Escuela Agrícola de Moca being set up in 1926 with professionals

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contracted mainly from Italy; and in the 1930s there was experimentation with varieties suchas Cuban Shade, or tabaco cubano, to compete on the international market.19

Two types of growing developed: the more established around La Vega and Santiagoin central Cibao; and the more shifting on cleared woodland, in areas like Mao, where tobaccowas grown in large quantities and sold to merchants in Santiago. Mao developed, as did manyother tobacco areas, with two main groups linked to tobacco: one in leaf growing andcommercialisation; and the other in cigar making based on family labour for localconsumption.

Manufacturing, Trujillo and La Tabacalera (1930-61)

For the years 1870-1930, Baud identified three market-driven periods: 1870-1900, especiallyafter the 1879 harvest, when little attention was paid to the quality of tobacco, as merchantswere buying bulk at low prices and quality was sacrificed to quantity; 1900-20, when themarket was more profitable and merchants and public officials tried to increase production,but the price to the growers remained low; and the post-World War I period, when the‘Danceof the Millions’sent prices to unprecedented heights, foreign importers came into the regionand made efforts to improve quality, and a group of market-oriented growers emergedalongside a larger and increasing number of poor growers.

Broadly speaking, these coincided with Lluberes’s earlier identification of three phases of manufacturing from the end of the nineteenth century, with small-scale cigar andcigarette production, some for export but mainly for Cibao regional consumption, to Trujillo’s La Tabacalera monopoly, consolidated especially after 1934: first, the growing number ofsmall concerns; second, their growth alongside larger new ones; and third, the consolidationof large companies with cigarette mechanisation.

A home industry had developed from the early-nineteenth century on, in Santiago andrural areas, producing cigars, plug and cigarettes primarily for the domestic market. Small-scale cigar rolling expanded rapidly in the late-nineteenth century, but by the early-twentiethcentury this was giving way to factories such as La Anacaona and La Matilde, of SimeónMencía y Sucursales, as well as La Aurora and CAT–these last in particular symbolising thegrowing division in the industry. Small informal sweatshops found themselves in a weakfinancial position, threatened by the larger producers and central government.20

In the early 1900s, tobacco manufacturing was boosted by protectionist measuresintroduced by President Ramón Cáceres, including higher taxes on imported cigars andcigarettes. Exports of cigars peaked in 1911, cigarettes in 1927 –machines having beenintroduced in Santiago’s La Anacaona and La Matilde factories and Santo Domingo’s La Habanera. However, cigar and cigarette exports together accounted for less than half a percent

19 Emilio Armando Olivo Ponce De León, Reflexiones sobre la agropecuaria dominicana, Santo Domingo:Editora El Nuevo Diario, 1999.20 In 1907, there is record of 215 male and 4 female cigar workers, 8 male and 10 female cigarette workers, and126 warehouse workers in 87 tabaquerías and 26 cigarrerías. These included 26 in Santiago, 11 in SantoDomingo and five in La Romana, but the remainder were scattered and much of the industry rested on home andoutwork production. In 1900, for example, Anacaona reported 35 factory workers and 12 women home workers,while Matilde reported 18 men and 36 factory women, and four women home workers. This contrasted withCAT a decade and a half later, employing 200 cigar workers, and its major cigar competitor La Aurora half thatnumber.

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of total exports, and were irregular, mainly for Caribbean markets, exported through MonteCristi, Sánchez, Comendador, Macorís and Barahona.

By 1934, the manufacturing industry was predominantly mechanised production ofcigarettes for domestic consumption. In contrast to one hundred registered manufacturers ofcigars, there were only two for cigarettes: CAT and the Dominican Tobacco Company, one oftwo US buying companies, along with Cullman’s Tropical Tobacco Co., which also had shares in CAT and Dominican Tobacco. When Trujillo moved to monopoly that year,Cullman cut secret deals but soon pulled out.

Trujillo came to power in 1930 with an economy in recession. Tobacco wasparticularly hard hit. From 1928 to 1930, the price for tobacco dropped by 44 percent (incomparison with cacao 41 percent, coffee 35 percent and sugar 12 percent). The ten millioncigars produced by the major factories in 1929 dropped back to five million in 1930. Thecrisis was such that in 1931 the Santiago Chamber of Commerce, Industry and Agriculturepenned a letter to Trujillo requesting government support and protection. Trujillo’s response,despite business opposition, was to increase state taxes and establish a monopoly on majorexports such as tobacco, coffee and cacao. The Trujillo plan was to oust the controlling groupof companies and families, initially by the government buying and selling leaf at guaranteedminimum prices; and by increasing cigar and cigarette price controls and taxes on productionand trade, and then by acquiring majority shares in CAT.21

From 1930 to 1945 Trujillo put through a radical development of infrastructure, inwhich the peasantry was forced to participate, building roads and irrigation channels. Thiswas supported by a policy of campesinización (peasantisation), with new colonias agrícolasand land distribution of 30 tareas22 to the impoverished, designed to strengthen minifundiaand achieve food self-sufficiency, but these were on mainly poor land in marginal areas.23

CAT modernised and expanded: sales agreements were signed with enterprises in SantoDomingo, San Pedro de Macorís, La Romana, Puerto Plata and Santiago; by the late 1930s,several small cigarette and other companies had been bought up; in the early 1940s, aid wasgiven to growers as part of Trujillo’s plan to Dominicanise the Haitian border; and WorldWar II saw a growth in production as imports declined. After Copello’s death in 1944,Trujillo took over his shares, thereby exercising complete control, and set up a new company,Comisiones en General, with exclusivity on the distribution and sale of Tabacalera’s products.The 1940s Secretaría de Agricultura launched a tobacco-growing campaign, headed by CostaRican-born agronomist Luis Caballo, who had come to the Dominican Republic in 1914.Carballo’s genetic experiments led to the creation of what became the leading Dominican tobacco, Amarillo Parado, and he was followed by Joaquín (Quín) Díaz, who created QuínDíaz.

In 1946, CAT’s daily output of 100 cigars was low in comparison with La Aurora’s350, and profits were down, but the new company strategy broadened to new types of

21 Rosario (2004). The full story includes many intrigues, one of which concerned Amadeo Barletta (DominicanTobacco). Traditionally Germany was the main exporter of tobacco, but in 1934 the volume of tobacco exportedto France vastly exceeded the volume to any other European country. To pay for an arms deal with France,Trujillo had imposed controls on tobacco production and trade (Valentina Peguero, The militarization of culturein the Dominican Republic, from the Captains General to General Trujillo, Lincoln & London: University ofNebraska Press, 2004). Trujillo clashed with Barletta over this and landed him in jail, the Italian governmentdemanded his release, and the US government also exerted pressure. After his release, Barletta moved to Cuba.22 Tarea is a land measure: 0.625 hectare (16 tareas = 1 hectare).23 Orlando Inoa, Estado y campesinos al inicio de la era de Trujillo, Santo Domingo: Librería la Trinitaria, 1994.

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contracts with national and foreign companies. In 1949, CAT signed an agreement withCentral Romana, for the exclusive sale of cigars and cigarettes, and this was followed byothers, as well as strong advertising campaigns in the press and on radio. Expansion wasfacilitated by repression of worker action, the regime appointing its own ‘official’ worker leaders; though unions were able to survive clandestinely, and 1940s ‘liberalisation’recognised workers’right to strike, and a labour code was introduced in 1951.

In 1953, CAT (Santo Domingo) had an output of some 9 million cigars (37.72 percentof total production), while León Jimenes (Santiago) and Imperial, León del Rosario (Moca)each produced some 7.5 million (31.14 percent). In 1954, an agreement was signed betweenCAT, León Jimenes and Imperial to create a consortium controlling 65 percent of nationalproduction and sales. In 1955, CAT entered into negotiations with Phillips Morris and J.R.Reynolds for the production and sale of their products in the Dominican Republic, but Trujillorejected their offer. The regime was by then facing ever greater opposition, and Trujillo wasshot in 1961.

The end of the Trujillo dictatorship signalled a new economic and political openingthat was both internal and external, and significantly so for tobacco, coming as it did when theUS embargo on Cuba created a vacuum on the US tobacco market. The first increase was inthe demand for Dominican leaf for cigar manufacturers in Tampa and New Jersey. Then, asproduction costs rose rapidly in the US and factories that had established operations outsidethe US –primarily in Central America and the Canary Islands –faced unrest, companiestransferred operations to the Dominican Republic, attracted by the concessions provided bythe new Dominican Free Trade Zones and low labour costs. Their success then attractedothers.

The seeds are sown (1962-92)

At the time of his death, Trujillo is estimated to have controlled 60 percent of total cultivatedland. This was the backdrop to the start of a land reform in 1962, and between 1962 and 1977close to 200,000 hectares were distributed to some 37,000 farm families in 300 communities.In the late 1970s a policy of cooperative farming was linked to agro-industry, and since thenthe balance between the state and private sectors has oscillated, often in favour of the latter.

INTABACO, set up in 1962 under the directorship of Luis Carballo, shaped tobaccogrowing over the following years. It survived the politically turbulent years of 1962-4, withthe ephemeral presidency and military ousting of Bosch, and the ensuing political vacuum.After the 1965 US occupation, it had the official support of Balaguer throughout his earlyyears in power (1964-78), as well as Hector Guzmán (1978-82) and Jorge Blanco (1982-86).Initial steps were taken to improve Amarillo Parado and Quín Díaz and, with seed selectionof Villa González grower Santiago Díaz, to create Chago Díaz. In 1963, Piloto Cubano wasintroduced, brought from Cuba; and 1964-5 saw the first experiments to produce San Vicentewrapper, also from Cuba, and US Dixie Shade, though these were not planted commerciallyuntil 1974.

INTABACO’s tobacco censuses of 1963 and 197224 evidence that, while tobaccocontinued to be produced overwhelmingly on small farms (of less than 75 tareas), during the

24 Instituto del Tabaco de la República Dominicana, Primer censo tabacalera nacional, 1963: Datospreliminares, Santiago, 1963; Segundo censo tabacalera nacional, 1973, Santiago, 1973. A third census was

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decade 1960-70 these declined in number, while the number of large farms increased. Thetobacco grown by the latter was Virginia or Burley, locally called tabaco cubano, and oftenby Cubans. In the words of González:

Many of the administrators and other employees of the largest estates are exiledCubans, and their compatriots are also employees in the tobacco warehouseswhere processing and packing take place. These Cubans, with their experienceand knowledge and their enterprising spirit, may very well help revolutionise thecountry’s tobacco industry.25

This was echoed by Ferrán:

The Cuban seed was introduced in the Dominican Republic in 1963 with the helpof Cuban farmers and producers who transposed a technology that was relativelycomplex to the neighbouring republic after Castro took power in Cuba. It was inthe interest of the Dominican government and the Fetab Inc. cooperative, whichwas then receiving a subsidy, to take over the market that the Cuban governmenthad lost in the United States…

The principle exports are to the United States, since the buyers there cannot obtainCuban tobacco, and the Canary Islands, where it is processed and re-exported to theUnited States.26

The UK and Switzerland were explored as possible markets, but they continued to buy fromCuba. Ferrán reported:

There are those of the opinion that in the matter of quality and prices, theDominican long filler can compete with the Cuban in these markets. But from theoutset two difficulties are faced: i) the manufacturers do not like to break good,already established commercial relations; ii) and also, they do not like to changeproducers because of the risk they would run in receiving tobacco with a differentaroma, which would affect the blends.27

While growers were financed for Cuban tobacco by a processing company guaranteeing acontract price, or Banco Agrícola through INTABACO, or commercial banks, there waspractically no financial aid for tabaco criollo. In contrast to the increase in tabaco cubano inthe 1960s, there was an overall decrease in tobacco production and export, Dominicantobacco being undercut on European markets by Philippine, Brazilian, Colombian and othertobaccos.28

For domestic consumption, it was mainly Chago Díaz and Quín Díaz, also known astabaco de olor. For export, there were two varieties: tabaco criollo, with subvarietiesAmarilla Parado, Punto de Lanza, Amarillo Planchado, and Piloto Cubano. By 1970, theCuban tobacco output of some 350 growers was in the region of 45,000 quintales on 35,000

later conducted: Tercer censo tabacalera nacional, 1977, Santiago, 1977. INTABACO produced regular reportsand studies on tobacco growing, such as Cultivo del tabaco negro en República Dominicana, Santiago, 200225 González (1975), p.34.26 Ferrán (1976), p.58.27 Ferrán (1976), p.65.28 In 1967, Brazilian and Philippine tobacco sold to Spain for an average US$32-35 and US$47-48, while theprice of Dominican tobacco was US$45-55.

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tareas of land, whereas in 1963 it had only been 3,500 quintales, a mere 0.27 percent ofnational production, on 890 tareas. Tobacco exports doubled in value 1962-71, with theCibao producing 70 percent of the country’s tobacco.

In the early 1970s there were fifteen buying companies, each employing over 450workers, and 35 local processing plants, each with some 150 workers, in addition to daylabourers. In 1972 one company alone, INETAB, with Dutch and Dominican capital, was toemploy 9,600 in production, and a further 14,000 in processing and packing. By the late1970s some 300,000 depended on tobacco, which was the country’s fourth agro-exportingsector (after sugar, coffee and cacao). In 1978 there were two cigarette factories and 35 smallcigar factories registered, with a concentration of the latter in Tamboril, Santiago province;and there were other small ‘factories’ unregistered and without brands, producing mainly for domestic consumption but with some export of cigars to the US. Registered export companiesnumbered eighteen. Piloto Cubano was produced by the medium to large grower and soldalready selected.

In 1978, Tabacalera Española and SEITA, the strongest in Europe, were looking toDominican leaf for mild cigarettes and cigar wrapper:

now that we know the cost of North American manpower has made it impossibleto produce in the US. At the moment, the Republic of Nicaragua, which had beenattractive for wrapper production, is facing political difficulties, which is why theDominican Republic offers great potential for growing this class of tobacco.29

Cuban émigré tobacco interests had operated in Nicaragua since 1963, with generous landgrants and other concessions from Anastasio Somoza. The year 1978, however, was the build-up to the 1979 Nicaraguan Revolution, occasioning greater attention to the DominicanRepublic. In December 1978, the National Council for Free Trade Zones (FTZs) wasestablished to coordinate promotion, operation and development of FTZs as the foreigninvestment model, and the 1980s saw their marked expansion, foreign investors attracted bycheap labour and tax concessions.

This had its early beginnings in 1967, when the US conglomerate Gulf & Westerntook over the US-owned South Puerto Rico Sugar Company, and with it almost 300,000 acresof land around La Romana refinery, and then rapidly diversified. In 1969, with the backing ofBalaguer’s policy of industrial incentives, it entered into an agreement with the government to manage an industrial park outside La Romana. With generous tax concessions it built theinstallation for its own subsidiary companies and attracted 24 other businesses, such that bythe 1980s turnover was greater than Dominican GDP. Then, in 1985, when the sugar industrywas in crisis, and having profited greatly by speculating on Dominican sugar on the futuresmarket, Gulf & Western sold its Dominican holdings to a Palm Beach-based consortiumheaded by the Fanjuls–émigrés from Cuba with major sugar holdings.

By the late 1970s, the food, beverage and tobacco industries were the most importantin terms of output and numbers employed. While mainly small family-run plants, in the threemain FTZs of La Romana, San Pedro de Macorís and Santiago there were over 40 tobaccoplants employing over 4,000 workers and tobacco manufacturing was reported as the largestsector in GDP (18.6 percent in 1978).30 There were 1.4 million hectares of tobacco undercultivation, an increase of over 100 percent since 1975, set to further increase when irrigation

29 Zaldívar (1979), pp.78-9.30 Economist Intelligence Unit, Dominican Republic: Annual Supplement, 1978, London: EIU, 1978.

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projects started to take effect, especially in the Cibao. Tobacco was fourth in export value,and production had overtaken that of Cuba. Disease and market setbacks caused exports tofall in 1982 and 1983; but the following year saw a slight recovery, by which time there were60 tobacco plants in FTZs, again set to increase in size and number. Cigar production andexports grew with the FTZs, taking off especially in the late 1980s, when the DominicanRepublic, as well as largest supplier of leaf to the US, became the leading world cigarexporter: in 1988, over 50 million units, followed by Cuba with 49 million and Honduras with32 million.

Concentration of production and trade in the 1980s Dominican Republic was such thatby the early 1990s a small group of companies, headed by Kelner’s Tabacos Dominicanosand cigarette monopolies E. León Jimenes and La Tabacalera, dominated the sector. LeónAsensio in Tamboril was one of the largest agro-industrial complexes. Trade was controlledby six major exporting companies, which were US, Dutch and Spanish, and their Dominicanbuying subsidiaries. The main exporting families were Espaillat, Thomén, Kelner-Tavares,and Mendez-Bogaert. The main companies were Compañía de Tabacos Quisqueya,Panamericana de Tabacos, Compañía Dominicana de Tabacos, José Mendez, and Compañíade Tabacos Dominicanos (TABADOM).

Cigar hiatus (1992-2007)

The year 1992 was a landmark for Dominican-Cuban tobacco, as major US backing for acigar come-back was launched with the publication of Cigar Aficionado, helping promote theDominican Republic as the new cigar mecca, with Cuban and US companies producing someof the same brands made in Cuba before 1959. The 1992 autumn/winter inaugural issuecarried three feature articles, two on Cuba, where tobacco had been hit hard in the crisisfollowing the break-up of its partner east European socialist bloc, and one on the DominicanRepublic.31 Since then Cigar Aficionado has played a significant part in the boom-bust periodof 1992-98, as well as the gradual recuperation and levelling out since.

Dominican exports grew from 73 million in 1994 to 320 million in 1998,predominantly to the US market. In 1997, tobacco moved into third place in domestic exports,after ferro-nickel and sugar. Such was the Dominican cigar success that in 1998 the MiamiHerald took great pleasure in reporting a team of Cuban cigar experts had spent several weeksin the Dominican Republic in the winter of 1998 observing production and markettechniques.32

While traditional companies strengthened their infrastructure, trained personnel,expanded growing areas, and financed growers to increase production, further concentratingproduction and trade, a multitude of smaller and newer companies were formed. Around ahundred new cigar factories were set up, with foreign and domestic capital, some by Cubanslong in the business, but many had little or no knowledge of the business, which led to poorquality tobacco and cigars.

The Cibao capital of Santiago, having been relegated by Trujillo and Balaguer, grewchaotically, its population doubling, from some 300,000 in the early 1980s to 600,000 in the

31 Gordon Mott, ‘CigarLand: The Dominican Republic has Become one of the World’s Largest Producers of Premium Cigars’, Cigar Aficionado (Autumn 1992), pp.62-143.32 Juan O. Tamayo, ‘Castro to firm up ties with Dominicans’, Miami Herald, 17 August 1998.

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mid-1990s, by which time its Victor Espaillat Mera FTZ (established in 1975) was producing80 percent of the country’s cigars. In 1997, there were 130 registered cigar manufacturers,18in FTZs, employing 125,000, some 55,000 of whom in agriculture, on 400,000 tareas, andexport value was over US$200 million.33 Other cigar centres –Tamboril, Villa González,Licey, San José de Las Matas, Licey, Janico, Villa Bosono –witnessed a similar populationincrease. The growth of Villa González was mainly due to the CAT cigar and cigarettefactory, and that of Tamboril to León Asensio.

One of the many newcomers in the mid-1990s was Spanish-born, Uruguayan-raisedLitto Gómez, who switched from the jewellery trade in Miami to cigar manufacturing inTamboril, acquiring 180 acres of land to grow Piloto Cubano and hiring an experiencedagronomist to run the farm. According to Gómez, “A lot of people said, ‘You’re moving to Tamboril? You’re crazy’, because of all the labor problems they had years ago”.34 Cuban-American Carlos Fuente, who had moved there in 1980, was quoted as saying: “In 1980, Tamboril was Vietnam. They were shooting machine guns in the streets… it was a war zone”. A Santiago FTZ was eminently attractive by comparison, and most of the export factoriesclustered in Santiago, bussing in workers from Tamboril.35

This changed with the cigar boom, when newcomers set up in Tamboril, paying higherwages and offering the chance to work commute-free. The poaching began in earnest. “We woke up one January”, Cuban-American Manuel Quesada declared in a Cigar Aficionadointerview, “and between Fuente, Davidoff, ourselves and León Jimenes, we were missing 300 to 400 cigar-makers”.36 La Romana, in the east, was sheltered from the ‘roller wars’ that dominated Santiago, whereby Tabacalera de García Ltd., Consolidated’s La Romana factory, appeared to have fared better than most.

Gómez was quick to insist he was not one of the new ‘mavericks’ but acknowledged:

… a lot of new factories opened in Tamboril. The town went from two to 80factories. Some were very small factories, with four to six rollers--but some hadas many as 50 or 60 rollers! And with most of these factories, the operators had noidea what making a cigar was all about. They just opened the factories, put theirequipment in and hired rollers from other factories. And they gave money away.They made large gifts to get the good and experienced rollers to work for them. Aroller who was making anywhere from $50 - 70 a week was offered a salary fourtimes that amount, of $200 - 250 a week.37

Gómez related how the mavericks had difficulty finding good leaf and keeping their factoriesopen five days a week; how there was no quality control; and how, when 90 percent went outof business with the 1998 slump, the mavericks were the first to go. As many as 60 Tamborilfactories went out of business between 1997 and 1999, leaving empty shells of factories andonly three export factories: Gómez’s Tabacalera La Flor, Tabacalera Real Felipe GregorioSA, and José A. Blanco’s Tabacalera Palma SA. Rollers were left without jobs, and, while

33 Olivo Ponce de León (1999).34‘Chat with Litto Gomez, Owner, La Flor Dominicana’, Transcipt of Live Interview from 19 August 1997,Cigar Aficionado Online.35 Ibid.36 Marvin R. Shanken, ‘An Interview with Manuel Quesada: Owner, MATASA, Makers of Fonseca, Licenciados, Romeo y Julieta, Jose Benito, Cubita, Royal Dominicana, Credo and Casa Blanca cigars’, CigarAficionado (February 1998), pp.103-23.37 Chat with Litto Gomez (1997).

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some of the established factories took back the good rollers, others would not. Tabacalera deGarcía, General Cigar Dominicana and Fuente were the greats, each making tens of millionsof cigars annually; and there were several mid-size companies, such as Cigars Davidoff(Swiss-based Davidoff withdrew cigar production from Cuba in the early 1990s), OK Cigars(Avos brand), Tabacalera El Crédito, Matasa, Tabacalera La Flor (La Flor Dominicana) andseveral others belonging to émigré Cubans.

By 1998, the Dominican Republic had 36 FTZs, home to 40.6 percent of enterprisesand employing 171,000, of whom some 37,000 were in Santiago I & II, 7,000 in Esperanzaand 6,063 in Moca. That year, seven new FTZs were approved, six in the Cibao –LagunaPrieta, Los Manantiales, Tamboril, Pontezuela in Santiago, Salcedo and Montecristi. Twelveof the enterprises approved were for processing tobacco, employing some 5,000.38 When theboom peaked, all were caught off-guard. At the start of 1998 there were more than 140factories, by April only 100, and the prognosis was for no more than 24 by the end of theyear.

The 1997-98 harvest of a record 940,000 quintales saw much tobacco grown poorlyand on poor land. Such was the glut of tobacco that, pressured by the Cibao Tobacco GrowersAssociation of Villa González and the Growers Union of Moca, the state paid out to each 40million and 10 million pesos, respectively, to buy tobacco at above market prices andpromised a further 200 million pesos. Warehouses were full, and the expectation was that themarket would recover the following year. That was not to be, and in 1999 a state resolutionwas passed to restrict planting, allowing only 20,000 tareas by growers with finance and abuying contract from manufacturer, processor or exporter. A total of 60 factories closed theirdoors, while 20 that were more established continued to operate normally, some with doubletheir 1994 sales, but with tobacco stockpiled.39 Sandoval charted the events of 1998:

The crisis in the Dominican tobacco sector that began in 1998 is the worst inmemory, if not history. Never before has a price for tobacco gone unnegotiated,and therefore unpaid, for two years. Tobacco is prone to crisis, but even in theworst crises a price was always set.40

The crisis was so severe that Monsignor Juan Antonio Flores Santana, Archbishop ofSantiago and other clergy signed the ‘Declaration of Villa González’ urging then President Leonel Fernández to find a solution to the crisis.

Small and medium producers were left unpaid, turning to other jobs where available,while a host of dependent industries also suffered. Producers staged large protests outsidegovernment offices. Secretary of Agriculture Amilcar Romero declared overproductionstemmed in no small measure from producers planting outside the dedicated tobacco zones:

In Cibao during the boom, people began to plant tobacco everywhere: in theiryards, in empty lots in Santiago and other cities and in other people’s yards... So much tobacco was harvested that in one instance, sartas, or braids of dryingtobacco leaves, were even hung to dry in the carport of a car sales lot.41

38 Danilo de los Santos & Carlos Fernández Rocha (eds), Este lado del país llamado el norte, Santo Domingo:Comisión Permanente de la Feria Nacional del Libro, 1998.39 Honduras, Nicaragua and Mexico, where production has also grown exponentially, found themselves in asimilar situation with large stocks.40 Sandoval (2001), p.2.41 Sandoval (2001), p.4.

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Traditional tobacco growers held the Secretaría de Agricultura, Banco Agrícola andAsociación Dominicana de Exportadores de Tabaco (ADET) in part to blame for providingcredit to non-traditional producers to plant tobacco on non-traditional lands. AgronomistManuel Ureña argued this was exacerbated by new factories producing low-quality cigars,with a shortage of wrapper. Only one cigar, Fuente Fuente Opus X, launched in 1995, claimedat the time to be made completely with Dominican tobacco; and in 1997 wrapper inConnecticut, Ecuador and Indonesia was affected by weather, while Central African wrapperwas of a high quality but only a small amount was produced.

In early 1998, more than 50 small factories closed, and in July 1998-June 1999 afurther 75-100, leaving more than 20,000 unemployed. By June 1999, 75 percent of 129Cibao cigar factories were closed and others were scaling back, occasioning major debate asto the solution: INTABACO should buy and market warehoused 1997-8 production; thereshould be long-term planning to avert overproduction; and a national council comprisingrepresentatives from the farming sector should be set up. Almost everyone was arguing thatthe government had to intervene in some form or another, buying excess tobacco andrenegotiating loans, though INTABACO warned against creating a bail-out mentality,exonerating producers planting outside officially designated tobacco-producing zones.42

Gradually the sector picked up. According to INTABACO’s Boletn Estadístico 2004,of the tobacco areas divided into north, northeast, central, and south, that year the north wasproducing almost 70 percent of Dominican tabaco negro, and the northeast a further 25percent. Santiago province alone produced 65 percent, with some 70 percent of the crop forcigar manufacturing, the highest price being commanded by Piloto Cubano. The areas withthe most planting were Valverde (over 12,000 tareas) and Navarrete and Villa González (eachin the region of 8,000); and over 40 percent of cultivation was under irrigation. Leaf wasexported mainly to the US, Puerto Rico and Honduras (over 80 percent of total export value),contrasting with exports to the next largest markets of Switzerland and Spain (each barely 4percent).43 Tobacco imports for cigar blends included wrapper, especially Connecticut USAand Connecticut Ecuador, together with filler and binder from Honduras, Salvador,Nicaragua, Indonesia, Java, Cameroon, and Brazil.

However, it was major companies that had most strengthened their hand, includinginternational conglomerates. In 1998, General Cigar relocated machine production fromAlabama to Santiago’s FTZ. In 1999, SEITA bought Consolidated; Swedish Match bought General Cigar’s Santiago factory and Tabacalera El Crédito; and Tabacalera Española subsequently merged with SEITA to form ALTADIS, the world’s largest cigar company, third largest cigarette company, and fourth in total tobacco trade, operating in Cuba for theEuropean market and the Dominican Republic for the US market.

There were five main manufacturers of leading brands (some owned, some madeunder license for other companies) in 2002: Tabacalera Arturo Fuente (including the brandsArturo Fuente, Ashton, Bauza, Cuesta Rey, Don Carlos, Fuente Fuente OpusX, Hemingway,La Unica); Tabacalera de García, subsidiary of Altadis USA (Cabañas, H. Upmann, DonDiego, Flamenco Las Palmas, Henry Clay, La Corona, Montecristo, Por Larrañaga, Primo del

42 Sandoval’s study (2001) examines tobacco as one aspect of a complex livelihood strategy, involving networksthat allow producers to continue when the sector is in crisis, homing in on segmented labour, gender and ethniclabour segmentation, as well as tobacco as symbolic for Ortiz & Bonó.43 Rafael Taveras & Valerio Tineo, Boletín Estadistico 2004, Santiago: Instituto del Tabaco de la RepúblicaDominicana, 2005. The 2005 Santiago telephone directory listed 47 tobacco companies.

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Rey, Romeo y Julieta 1875, Santa Damiana); General Cigar, subsidiary of Swedish Match,(Bolívar, Canaria D’Oro, Cifuentes, Cohiba, Macanudo, Partagás, Ramón Allones);MATASA, (José Benito, Cubita, Fonseca, Licenciados); and Tabacos Dominicanos (Avo,Davidoff, Zino). That year, Tabacalera De García’s La Romana factory was declared thelargest factory under one roof in the world. While only employing half the number of workersas at the height of the cigar boom (2,500 in 2002 as against 5,000 in 1997-98), the factory wasmaking more than 50 million cigars a year, of which 28-30 million were hand-made.

Cubans in

Cuban involvement in the Dominican Republic in the early post-1959 years was in agricultureand is perhaps best symbolised by Napoleón S. Padilla. Born in Havana in 1919, Padilla diedin Miami in the late 1990s, having published his memoirs.44 His father was the son of animmigrant Canary Islander, who settled in Cuba’sPinar del Río province in the latenineteenth century, at a time when large numbers of Canary Islanders were being encouragedto settle in Cuba. The family lost property in 1896 during the war of independence and wasthen briefly in the tobacco business. Padilla trained as an agricultural engineer, firstspecialising in sugar. He moved to tobacco when the San Juan y Martínez ExperimentalTobacco Station opened in 1945, developing flue-cured and Burley cigarette tobacco, and wasinvolved in proposals to create the Tribunal de Cuentas, Banco Nacional and Banco deFomento Agrícola e Industrial. He worked for Villaamil, Santalla y Cía (1948-57); and from1954 to 58, by then a leading tobacco agronomist, he travelled regularly on tobacco businessto the US, especially North Carolina (Duke and North Carolina State Universities and theOxford Tobacco Experimental Station).

Shortly after the 1959 Revolution, Padilla was involved in a tobacco deal to beat theimpending US blockade, but he soon opposed the revolutionary government’s proposals for land reform and nationalisation of industry and left Cuba in June 1960. In 1962 he was sentby the Interamerican Development Bank to work in the post-Trujillo Dominican Republic.Having met then Dominican President Juan Bosch earlier in Cuba, he was invited to attendthe 1962 inauguration of the Estación Experimental Tabacalera del Pontón, La Vega. Bosch’s new Secretary of Agriculture, Antonio Guzmán, supported the Institute and sent two youngDominican agronomists, one of whom was Hipólito Mejía, to study in North Carolina. Padillahelped draft Dominican tobacco legislation similar to that of pre-1959 Cuba, including Law5961 to create INTABACO. His catalyst mission was to work with INTABACO to develop atobacco sector that could fill the void created on the US market by the embargo on Cuba. Herecommended Cuban growers and brought in Cuban technicians to introduce new tobaccos,carry out a census of tobacco farms, and conduct soil studies and training at Pontón.

In 1966, Padilla went to work for the United Nations Food and AgriculturalOrganisation, but in 1978 he was contacted by Mejía, then Secretario de Agricultura under thenewly elected President Guzmán, and returned to the Dominican Republic in 1979, 1980 and1982. He retired in 1982, but kept alive his tobacco interest by supporting the CubanAmerican National Foundation lobby against any US attempt to normalise relations withCuba. This included new legislation to extend the extra-territoriality of the US embargo, and

44 Padilla (1988).

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preparing cases for the US-based Asociación Cubana de la Industria del Tabaco againstinternational tobacco companies involved in Cuba.45

The post-1959 Cuban presence in Dominican cigar manufacturing that followed in the1970s was twofold. Cuban family firms began to relocate, beginning with the Quesadas in1974, followed by the Fuentes, Olivas, Toraños and Pérez-Carillos in the 1980s and 1990s.Since its inception in 1992, Cigar Aficionado has regularly featured them and the DominicanRepublic, comparing it favourably with Cuba. In 1996, at the height of the cigar boom, thecentral town of Villa González, with its cigar factories, was likened to Pinar del Río, in VueltaAbajo. In the words of Emilio Reyes, of Tabaco Flor de los Reyes:

I just spent four years in Cuba’s Vuelta Abajo and Partido region and I canpromise you that the Yaque Valley [in the Cibao] is growing some of the besttobacco in the world right now. In some cases, this valley may be growing betterquality tobacco than even in Cuba.46

The Fuentes story is particularly salient. While Padilla’s family story began with nineteenth century Spanish immigration to Cuba and post-1959 Cuban emigration to the US, the USCuban émigré story of the Fuente family began in the early twentieth century to Tampa,Florida, and in the 1980s and 1990s they became solidly grounded in the DominicanRepublic. In the 1992 inaugural issue of Cigar Aficionado, Gordon Mott wrote of ArturoFuente Sr. and the Dominican Republic:

[H]e no longer feels like an outsider... The Dominican Republic is as much athome to him as any of the three other countries where the family has made cigarsbefore. In fact, the Caribbean island nation has become home to many of theworld’s major cigar makers outside of Cuba: General Cigar, Consolidated Cigar,Tabacos Dominicanos, Arturo Fuente and Matasa as well as others. Thesecompanies produce a range of premium brands, mainly for the American market,including Partagas, Macanudo, H. Upmann, Don Diego, Arturo Fuente andDavidoff. For most, the journey was a simple choice based on business necessity–a place to make cigars after Fidel Castro took control of the Cuban cigarindustry and the US trade embargo closed the doors on Cuba in 1962.47

As Fuente Sr. told the story, four of their factories had been damaged by fire–Tampa in 1921and 1948, Nicaragua in 1977, and Honduras in early 1979. They had either rebuilt or movedon. After a failed attempt to produce hand-rolled cigars again in Tampa in 1979, with Cubanand Vietnamese labour, they had two choices, Carlos Fuente Jr explained:

Sell out or go to a foreign country again… civil wars or political instability in Central America argued against returning there. Mexico’s strict investment laws

45 When I spoke with Padilla in Miami in 1988, he was working on these cases.46 James Suckling, ‘Tobacco Central. The Dominican Republic Has Some of the World’s BestGrowing Regionsfor Premium Cigar Tobacco’, Cigar Aficionado (Autumn 1996). Suckling wrote regularly for Cigar Aficionado.Two years later he wrote:‘After the Gold Rush. Leading Dominican Cigar Companies Take Back the RetailShelves as Newcomers Struggle’, Cigar Aficionado (April 1998), pp.105-15.47 Mott (1992), pp. 63-5.

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at the time dampened expectations of a reasonable profit. And Cuba was out ofbounds. In a sense, the Dominican Republic was the only option left.48

The Fuentes had considered the Dominican Republic in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until 1980 that they set up operations in Santiago’s FTZ. By 1992, Fuente boasted the largest hand-madecigar factory in the world; and, when Dominican cigar exports topped 60 million cigars in1993, an 18 percent increase over 1992, and the Dominican Republic ranked first in the worldfor handmade premium cigar production, Fuente was in the lead, producing over 20 million.None of the Dominican cigars made were puros (pure) –that is, made from 100 percentDominican tobacco –but in 1992 Fuente harvested the first wrapper from what was tobecome Chateau de la Fuente, and in 1995 launched his new Fuente Fuente Opus X, a 100percent Dominican cigar.

From their first factory in 1980, which was little more than four walls and a roof, withseven employees, the Fuentes rose to four factories, employing over 1,000 rollers, and theirown leaf facility in the FTZ in Palmar Abajo, Villa González. The cigars manufactured wereeither owned totally or partially, or made under license. Some brands don’t carry the Fuente name: like Ashton, a joint venture with Holt’s Cigar Co.; Bauzá, marketed by Oscar Boruchin of Mike’s Cigars in Miami; and brands such as Cuesta-Rey and La Unica under license withthe Tampa-based Newman family. Each of the four factories makes certain brands. FactoryNo. 1 in Santiago, the oldest, makes Arturo Fuente, Hemingway, Fuente Fuente OpusX,Ashton Cabinets, Savinellis, Diamond Crown and a couple other brands. Factory No. 2 inMoca manufactures most of the cigars for the Newman family –Cuesta-Rey, La Unica.Factory No. 4, in Santiago, makes Sosa, Bauzá and Montesino, though some Montesino ismade at Factory No. 1 and Factory No. 3.

It is Carlos Fuente Jr. who has become one of the most prominent figures inDominican cigars. Time spent in Nicaragua on the tobacco farms of Angel Oliva and his son,Johnny, shaped his desire to grow Dominican wrapper, to create a cigar with 100 percentDominican tobacco. His determination was even greater after being told in 1989 that cigarmanufacturers in the Dominican Republic were not really making Dominican cigars, theywere assembling them with tobacco from elsewhere. Knowing that there had been trials withDominican wrapper in the late 1960s, Fuente approached Oliva to produce Cuban-seedwrapper on his Dominican farm. There, according to Oliva, the soil was just like that of SanLuis in Cuba, where he had grown up. Oliva, also big in Ecuadorian wrapper, had left behindtheir Pinar Del Río business in 1960 and moved into growing in Central and South America.Then, after the 1973 Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua, Oliva turned to the DominicanRepublic. Oliva later sold the Dominican farm on which they had conducted the trials toFuente.

From one factory in 1990, eight years later the Fuentes had four, three in Santiago andone in Moca FTZs. As fast as they trained workers, Fuente complained, they would bepoached by others: “that’s when my father said the scene reminded him of when he used towatch the old cowboy movies with the California Gold Rush. The cigar business became likethe Gold Rush.”Fuente reminisced:

48 Mott (1992), p.65.

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It’s unbelievable when I think back to being in Ybor City [Tampa] with my fatherand my grandfather, in a little wooden house that had a little cigar factory in theback… our heritage is Cuban. The way we make cigars, the way my father blends cigars, was taught by my grandfather. Before the embargo, we made cigars strictlyof Cuban tobacco. Our heart was in Cuban tobacco. After the embargo, we wereforced to look for other tobaccos, but it was always that love, that heritage... wemake a cigar with that kind of complexity often found in Cuban cigars, yet alwaystrying to achieve finesse and balance.

We all have very strong emotional ties to Cuba. We always will have emotionalties to Cuba. When I was born and then raised in Tampa, I didn’t speak Englishuntil I started first grade. My heritage is Cuban; I’m very proud to be a Cuban-American. When I was growing up, the conversation in my home was always thatwhen there was an opportunity to go back to Cuba, we would visit... I would liketo go back to Cuba one day... and meet the great cigarmakers of Cuba and thegreat tobacco growers... but not necessarily to open a factory. I believe myresponsibility is to the Dominican Republic and to our customers. I have a greatlove for the Dominican Republicand that is where my heart is…49

Among the Cubans who moved into key positions in the two major US companiesoperating in the Dominican Republic (Consolidated Cigar and General Cigar), the story ofBenjamín (Benji) Menéndez Toraño is worth recounting. Of Spanish-origin, son of thefounder of H. Upmann and Montecristo brands in Cuba, who left in 1960 for Miami, where heworked for Philip Morris. He then went to the Canary Islands, where in 1961 he foundedCompañía Insular Tabacalera (CIT) in Las Palmas, making Montecruz, a Montecristo look-alike. The company sold to Gulf & Western in 1972, and he stayed on until 1977, when heand his brother Felix opened a cigar factory in Brazil. Hired by General Cigar in 1983, hewent to Jamaica and then the Dominican Republic to become General Cigar’s vice-presidentfor Dominican premium cigar manufacture, working for company director Ed Cullmann, whohad earlier sold the family the US rights to Montecristo. A parallel history is that of AngelDaniel Nuñez, son of a Dominican tobacco farmer who, after training as an agronomist,started in INTABACO in 1972 and General Cigar in 1974. He worked under Cullmangrowing Havana-seed Connecticut wrapper leaf in the Dominican Republic for Dominican-made Partagás and Macanudo cigars, using Connecticut and Cameroon wrappers –part of abroader General Cigar strategy to develop new strains of tobacco grown in Connecticut,Honduras (San Agustín), Nicaragua (Ometepe), and the Dominican Republic. Nuñez rose tobe President of General Cigar in late 2006. The company had by then been bought bySwedish Match AB of Stockholm and was reported to have 8,000 employees, with leafgrowing and manufacturing in Honduras and the Dominican Republic, and whose brandsincluded Macanudo, Partagás, Cohiba, Punch and Hoyo de Monterrey. Menéndez himself leftGeneral Cigar in 1997 to become director of Central American and Caribbean tobaccooperations for Tabacalera Española, subsequently Altadis USA.

After Alonso Menéndez and Pepe García, makers of Montecristo cigars, left Cuba,García bought the Menéndez interest out and began making Montecruz, along with Don

49 Marvin R. Shanken,‘AnInterview With Carlos Fuente Jr., President, Tabacalera A. Fuente y Cía.’, CigarAficionado (December 1998). I visited the Fuente main factory in Santiago’s free trade zone in 2006, which onthe outside was a standard cement bloc building but inside had been refurbished in sections reminiscent of anineteenth century Havana cigar factory. When I interviewed Fuente there, he exuded a pride in both his Cubanheritage and his Dominican factories and farm.

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Diego and others, for the Canary Islands company Companía Insular Tabacalera (CIT).Consolidated bought CIT in 1972, and in 1982-83 Gulf & Western moved Consolidatedproduction from the Canaries to La Romana. In 1988, after Hurricane Gilbert tore the roof offthe Gore family’sRoyal Jamaica factory in Kingston, Jamaica, Consolidated started to makecigars for them. Consolidated was soon to buy the trademark and relocate production to theDominican Republic. In 1989, Consolidated acquired the American Cigar Company,complete with rights to Cuban trademarks owned by American Tobacco’s pre-1959subsidiary Tabacalera Cubana.

The trademark issue became highly litigious, with manufacturers who had left Cubaclaiming the right to their trademarks. García had been in litigation in the US, and in the mid-1970s the US government decided he was the rightful owner of H. Upmann, Montecristo andPor Larrañaga in the US. Cuban Cigar Brands was formed as a partnership between Garcíaand Consolidated, which had a controlling interest. This was initially a holding operation.Then, in 1975, Consolidated started to produce H. Upmann for the United States, payingroyalties to Cuban Cigar Brands. There was also litigation in other countries, especiallyFrance and Spain, involving Cifuentes over Partagás, Ramón Allones and La Gloria Cubanatrademarks and Consolidated over H. Upmann and Montecristo (Montecristo accounting for75 percent of the premium cigar business in Spain). One outcome was the trademarkagreement between Tabacalera Española and Consolidated, the latter keeping the US andDominican rights. By 1995, Consolidated was producing 45 million handmade cigars: 25million from the Dominican Republic, 12 million from Honduras and 8 million from Mexico.

After the 1990s boom, the Dominican cigar factory run by Menéndez (TND) wasclosed and production moved to Tabacalera de García Ltd., run by José Seijas, with itsmassive factory in La Romana making all the Dominican brands for Altadis USA, includingbest-selling ‘Cuban’ brands Romeo y Julieta, H. Upmann and Montecristo. In effect, Cuban-Americans and international cigar capital positioned itself well around the US embargo onCuba. But what of the Dominican tobacco sector?

Dominicans out

Rosemary Vargas-Lundius was among those who documented 1980s rural poverty, a majorcause of which was attributed to limited access to productive land and credit, reinforced bygovernment price stabilisation not pegged to rural income. Vargas-Lundius argued the needfor a Dominican rural development strategy to stem what by then had become a massiverural-urban-overseas drift.50 The overseas drift was overwhelmingly to the US and has beendocumented in a number of studies produced primarily by Dominican-Americans in the US.51

50 Rosemary Vargas-Lundius, Peasants in Distress: Poverty and Unemployment in the Dominican Republic,Boulder, San Francisco & Oxford: Westview Press, 1991.51 The creation of the Dominican Studies Institute at City College, City University of New York, provided asignificant impulse to this. Among the key general studies are, Sarah Aponte (ed.), Dominican Migration to theUnited States, 1970-1997: An Annotated Bibliography, New York: CUNY Dominican Studies Institute, n.d.;Sherri Grasmuck,‘International Stair-Step Migration: Dominican Labor in the United States and Haitian Laborin the Dominican Republic’,in R. & I. Harper Simpson (eds), Research in the Sociology of Work: PeripheralWorkers, Vol. 2, CT & London: JAI Press, 1983; ‘The impact of Emigration on National Development: Three Sending Communities in the Dominican Republic’, Development and Change, 15 (1984); Jorge Duany,Quisqueya on the Hudson: The Transnational Identity of Dominicans in Washington Heights, New York: CUNYDominican Studies Institute, 1994; Silvio Torres-Saillant & Ramona Hernández, The Dominican Americans,Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1998; Ramona Hernandez, The Mobility of Workers Under Advanced

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During the period 1961-86 over 400,000 Dominicans legally migrated to the US. The annualaverage during 1962-72 was in the region of 11,500, increasing to 16,000 in the 1970s, over30,000 in the 1980s, and 40,000 in 1991 and 1992. It was not until 1996 that a decline began,and in 1998 only 20,000 were admitted. By and large, scholars concur that such a massiveexodus was not a spontaneous movement but an orchestrated event. Successive waves havebeen linked to political events, economic policies and US legislation favouring a chain ofthird world immigration, as well as specifics in the Dominican case.

Emigration was restricted by Trujillo to stem the mounting protest from outside andfoment domestic population growth to fuel agricultural modernisation and expansion andindustrialisation. After Trujillo, US policy favoured emigration to release rising social andpolitical tension. Fear of a second Cuba, escalating unrest, the overthrow of the ephemeralpresidency of Juan Bosch in 1963, and the US invasion of 1965 to pacify the revolutionarymovement to reinstate Bosch, led many to migrate. Initially, it was a middle class fearful ofthe Bosch regime and then of popular unrest after Bosch’s defeat. The US ambassador to theDominican Republic requested new facilities and extra personnel for the Consulate in 1962,and advocated visas as a safety valve against political agitation and as a way to improverelations between the two countries. Many progressives, labour organisers and dissidentstudents were given visas, and others were deported under the terms of agreement betweenthe Dominican and US governments.

During the second half of the twentieth century, a momentous shift in Americaneconomic life took place, as US transnational firms searching for cheap labour and maximumprofit shifted manufacturing to the Third World, especially Latin America. The USgovernment campaigned to convince nations to lower their tariffs and adopt ‘free trade’ policies and FTZs, which have increased the gap between rich and poor and acceleratedlabour migration. US assessments of impending domestic unskilled labour shortagesencouraged migration until the late 1960s, when there were changes in migration policy. Bythen, family-centred chain migration replaced US-initiated deterritorialisation, makingemigration a self-sustaining process, benefiting a second wave of migrants and creating asafety net for a third massive wave of undocumented migrants from 1978 to 1994.

Out-migration was conditioned by the way the Dominican elite managed state-building and economic planning. The restructuring of the Dominican economy, agribusiness,and especially the FTZs rendered US production five times more costly. The decade of thedevelopment of FTZs in the Dominican Republic (1982-92) was also the decade of mostmigration; FTZ profits were booming, but GDP was down and per capita consumptiondropped by 22 percent. In 1988, the Dominican Republic was second only to Mexico for thenumber of FTZ firms in Latin America and the Caribbean, yet FTZs only employed 3 percentof the labour force, and many were internal migrants, women, non-unionised, earning lessthan the national minimum wage, and with a high turnover.

Migrants were primarily from underprivileged sectors, but there were moreprofessionals in the 1980s due to deteriorating conditions under an austerity plan in line withInternational Monetary Fund (IMF) conditions. A 1985 IMF loan allowed the Dominicangovernment to reschedule the commercial bank and Paris Club debt. Repayments proved tooonerous and were suspended a year later, occasioning civil disturbances. In 1989, President

Capitalism: Dominican Migration to the United States, New York: Columbia University Press, 2002; SilvioTorres-Saillant & Blas R. Jiménez, Desde la Orilla: hacia una nacionalidad sin desalojos, Santo Domingo:Editorial Manatí, Ediciones Librería La Trinitaria, 2004.

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Joaquín Balaguer turned against the IMF, but in 1990, shortly before being sworn in for asixth term, he announced the doubling of fuel and basic food prices as part of austeritymeasures for resuming IMF assistance. The real value of the minimum wage fell during 1980-85 by 20 percent, and there was little improvement in subsequent years as evidenced in theriots of 1988, 1989 and 1990, by which time unemployment was running at 29 percent.52 By1991, the purchasing power of the minimum wage was at half its 1970 value, and swathes ofthe middle class were affected.

Balaguer tackled economic development by easing US investment and emphasisingindustry, commerce and finance and political stability by dismembering opposition throughincarceration, assassination, and expatriation of political dissidents. During his first twelveyears there were dichotomous tendencies: unprecedented economic growth, in the form ofindustry and business, alongside growing unemployment levels and urban drift. The 1980swere characterised as ‘the lost decade’, and, while the late 1990s were again economic boom years, poverty and unemployment rates remained consistently high. Balaguer had the supportof the traditional landed elite and new entrepreneurial groups, and suppressed politicalopposition to modernising the state and economy. Unemployment rose from 15 percent in1971 to 30 percent in 1991, and by 1992 per capita income was below that of the early 1970s.Ramona Hernández, Director of the Dominican Studies Institute in New York, hascharacterised this as US and Dominican state complicity in an “evil alliance” of capital andstate, benefiting only the few, whereby large numbers opted to seek their fortunes abroad.53

The link between the peasantry and out-migration was early established in an articleby González entitled ‘Peasants’ Progress: Dominicans in New York’.54 In 1983, SherriGrasmuck introduced the concept of ‘stair-step migration’ in enclave patterns of labour circulation, comparing Dominican labour in the US and Haitian labour in the DominicanRepublic. Studying the impact of emigration on three sender communities, two of which wereLicey and Santiago, she highlighted the need for agrarian reform and agricultural investmentto avert the Dominican Republic as a disarticulated economy,55 with persistently highunemployment and depressed wages, provoking migration.

This was demonstrated in Ferrán and Patricia Pessar’s study of seven communities linked with major export commodities–La Aldea, Juan Pablo, Los Pinos and San José de lasMatas (coffee); Licey al Medio and Tamboril (tobacco); and La Amapola (cacao):

The international demand for the cash crops grown in the seven communities hasencouraged class differentiation and heirarchy as successful commercial farmershave used their profits and loans to buy additional land from small and middle-sized landowners. The latter have often descended into the ranks of the landlesswho search for paid agricultural work.56

For them, emigration became a strategy.

The links between tobacco and out-migration were closely documented by Castro(1985) in the case of Licey, whose fortunes for two centuries had revolved around tobacco.Dominant to an extent unusual even for the region, tobacco was the chief cash crop by far and

52 Economist Intelligence Unit, Dominican Republic: Country Profile 1990-91, London: EUI, 1991.53 Hernández (2002).54 González (1970).55 Grasmuck (1983, 1984).56 Ferrán & Pessar (1991).

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tobacco processing, the principal industry. In the late 1980s impoverished minifundism was atits maximum expression in Licey, as also migration to the US, whose earliest origins dateback to the 1930s but increased significantly from the early 1960s.57 According to a 1974national survey, 4.1 percent of Dominican households had at least one migrant member livingabroad.58 In 1980, the figure was 32.8 percent for urban Licey and 11.4 percent for ruralLicey, and for Santiago 16.7 percent.59

Why was Licey such a high emigration community? By the fall of Trujillo, theeconomy had become increasingly unviable. In 1960, two years before the onset of large-scalemigration, Licey had the second highest agricultural population per hectare, with a density of3.86 times the national average and 2.85 denser than Santiago. A total of 81.4 percentagricultural land was under cultivation that year, but with a low level of productivity, astobacco was grown with a low level of capital investment and technical input. Tabaco criollowas traditionally cultivated on tiny plots by peasants with little access to capital or moderntechniques and relatively primitive methods, and rarely irrigated: 97.4 percent of Liceyholdings were under 5 hectares, compared with 86.3 percent for the country, and 72.42percent were under one fifth of the upper limit of a manifundio, compared with 49.9 percentfor the country. The median holding was 5-10 tareas.

There was little evidence of any major change in land tenure or agriculturaltechnology but rather manoeuvring for control at the top for substantial profit, while thoselower in the chain were forced to adapt to less favourable terms. The capital accumulation anddynamism of the large international traders and manufacturers, and to a lesser extent localintermediaries, contrasted with the stagnation and low level of capitalisation in the producingareas. The six huge international tobacco leaf-buying firms, together controlling 90 percent ofthe world market, demonstrated tremendous gains in productivity from capitalisation andtechnology in the tobacco manufacturing industries, while producers in Licey were dependenton animal power for transporting their crop. A hierarchy of relatively large firms controlledpacking and processing operations locally through middle-sized packers and warehouses; andwholesalers and small tobacco buyers provided direct financing for the crop, and bought fromthe producers themselves. Cheap tobacco was grown by virtue of the fact that it wasarticulated with subsistence farming, which supplemented the insufficient income derived bysmall producers from selling at low prices.

It was, in Castro’s view, a highly skewed informal arrangement, allowing easy credit to producers but at a high cost. The changes of the twentieth century had produced anenormous concentration of economic power at one pole of the tobacco universe and anincreasingly unviable and less independent producer at the other, which resulted inincreasingly onerous sharecropping arrangements. In 1960, 15.3 percent of Licey land,compared with 3.7 percent for Santiago province, was a media60, favoured by growersbecause they lacked money to pay rent and needed to supplement their meagre income,though often only breaking even or ending up in debt. Where growers had carried outprocessing, there were now packing warehouses for fermenting, selecting and packing theleaf, drawing their labour force (80 percent female) from households in the area, hired on adaily basis, avoiding any benefit payments, at wage levels described as superexploitative.

57 Castro (1985)58 Antonio Ugalde, Frank D. Bean & Gilberto Cardenas, ‘International Migration from the Dominican Republic:Findings from a National Survey’, International Migration Review 13 (1979).59 Grasmuck (1984).60 A media is a sharecropping system whereby the grower turns over half the crop to the landowner/middleman.

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Remittances helped equalise sender communities and there was return migrant mobility, butemigration primarily functioned as an escape valve, helping maintain the status quo andconservatism rather than introduce new thinking.

Two Dominican worlds –that of the Cibao and New York –became integrallyinterconnected in more ways than remittances and returnees. From 1980-90, the New YorkDominican population increased from 125,380 to 332,713, the fastest growing ethnic group inthe city for that period. By 1990, there were over 300,000 Dominicans in New York; and in2000, out of a total of over one million Dominicans in the US, 53.2 percent lived in that city.Much like the Puerto Ricans of the 1950s, the Dominicans went largely unnoticed at first, butby the 1990s they comprised the second-largest Hispanic group in the North East. They formpart of the ‘latinisation’ of the US, inwhat has been described as the “harvest of empire”.61

Migration from the ‘empire’s backyard’ –Mexico, the Caribbean, Central and South America–has been unparalleled since World War II, and has been escalating since the 1960s.

The Dominican migration fits the larger picture of contingents of workers shuttlingbetween their national territories and the diaspora, such that many ‘Dominican-Yorks’ “live suspended between two worlds, developing survival strategies in competition for scarceresources and labour market incorporation”.62 While the vast majority went into the servicesector and light manufacturing, especially the garment industry, a dynamic enclave economyof small businesses emerged.63 In the 1990s, Dominicans were estimated to own over 20,000such businesses, especially grocery stores, cabs, travel agencies, restaurants, and smallsweatshops, such as cigar chinchales, known as buckeyes in the US, often taken over fromCubans who came before them.

Today, in Manhattan and the Bronx can be found a handful of small storefronttabaquerías, hand-rolling cheap cigars for over-the-counter sales, which might have beenbought from Cubans or started up by Dominicans. From those surveyed in 2006,64 they aretypically from Tamboril, employ only a few rollers and buy their tobacco from middlemen –some Miami-based, others in the Dominican Republic–or direct from family-farmed land inthe Tamboril area. Thus, Martínez Cigars, today run by Jesús Martínez, opened for businessin the Chelsea district of Manhattan in 1974 when his father Antonio left Tamboril, bringingwith him skilled Tamboril rollers to hand roll premium cigars using blends of Dominicantobaccos with Connecticut, Cameroon and Sumatra wrappers. Others in Manhattan include LaRosa Cubana owned by Frank Almanzar, whose father Antonio was born in Santiago, workedfor seventeen years at La Aurora, and founded the company in 1958; Q [Quisqueya] Cigars;and PB Cuban Cigars, which in response to the city’s smoking ban introduced a legalsmoking lounge. All use the word ‘Cuban’ to attract customers, deriving from their use of Dominican Cuban-seed tobacco filler. Rosario Dominican Cigars in the Bronx markets cigarshand rolled with leaf from the farm in the Tamboril area that has been in the family forgenerations. Reserva Dominicana began in 2001 when owner Israel Capellán imported cigarshis family made in the Dominican Republic, and has a small retail outlet in Manhattan andfive rollers in the Bronx making cigars for the Manhattan shop. In Union City, New Jersey,once a stronghold of the Cubans, there are now only a handful of tabaquerías, owned by

61 Juan González, Harvest of Empire: A history of Latinos in America, New York & London: Viking, 2000.62 Duany (1994).63 Alejandro Portes & Luis Guarnizo, ‘Tropical Capitalists: US-Bound Immigration and Small-EnterpriseDevelopment in the DR’, Working Papers, Commission for the Study of International Migration andCooperative Development, 1990.64 I conducted an informal survey in 2006 using a snowball approach to visit the shops and talk with the rollers.

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Dominicans. One is Puros Indios, which no longer hand rolls there but maintains a retailoutlet, along with one in Miami, for cigars made in the Dominican Republic. None have thequality or cost anywhere near as much as premium cigars, but these ‘corner factories’, Savona wrote in Cigar Aficionado, “afford the cigar lover an opportunity to get up close and personalwith… something that’s rare in twenty-first-century America: rolling cigars entirely byhand”.65

Bonó andthe end of ‘Dominican exceptionalism’

But let us return to Pedro Francisco Bonó’s vision of Dominican tobacco ‘exceptionalism’ and the Dominican tobacco peasantry. Bonó was born in Santiago, in 1828, and died in 1906,his life spanning much of the turbulent nineteenth century. As a young man, he was drawninto the 1857 Revolution and Restoration. He epitomised what were identified as thenineteenth century patriotic, liberal, federalist views of the Partido Azul (Blue Party) of Cibaotobacco interests, in opposition to the Partido Rojo (Red Party) of the south. The Blues (losAzules) came to power in 1879 as the party of Cibao tobacco interests, with Puerto Plataoriented to Hamburg, Bremen and St Thomas, in contrast to the Reds (los Rojos) of southerncattle and lumber interests, with Santo Domingo oriented to England, Curaçao and St.Thomas.

Rodríguez Demorizi is to be attributed with rescuing Bonó from oblivion,66 andBonó’s thinking has permeated Dominican intellectual thinking ever since. Bonó introducedconcepts of class, race, capitalism and inequality into Dominican history, and mounted aspirited defence of the Cibao peasantry, arguing that tobacco was ‘democratic’in contrast to‘oligarchic’cacao. Sugar was less important at the time, but his anger was also directedagainst the encroaching sugar industry in the south and its impact on the dispossessed. This hesaw as capitalist and foreign, whereas tobacco was nationalist, much as Ortiz later saw Cubantobacco in counterpoint to sugar.

The patriotic liberalism of the Cibao, based on tobacco, was contrasted with theconservatism and foreignness of the south, based on cattle, forestry and then sugar. In thewords of Vega: “tobacco has always been more Dominican than sugar, due to its birth, its spirit and its method of production, industrialisation and marketing”.67 Moya Pons elaboratedon how Cibao tobacco:

maintained the whole population occupied in the cyclical production of tobacco,putting in train the entire energy of the region. Tobacco was an industry that had amultiplier effect in terms of employment and income, and was thereforedemocratising in its social effects… The whole process put inmotion anenormous body of growers with their families… day labourers, thread and bagmakers, packers, makers of plug tobacco, cigarette makers, traders, creditors and

65David Savona, ‘The Corner Cigar Factory: A Steadfast Group of Small-Output Factories Brings Cigar MakingBack to New York’, Cigar Aficionado, December 2004, p.214. Savona also published on Dominican tobacco.See for example: David Savona,‘The Calm. The Gold Rush Days of the Cigar Boom are Gone, and So Are Mostof the Quick-Buck Artists Who Flocked to the Dominican Republic’, Cigar Aficionado (October 1999), pp.228-39.66 Rodríguez Demorizi (1964). Studies since then incude Freddy Peralta, ‘La sociedad dominicana vista por Pedro Francisco Bonó’, EME-EME, 5:29 (1977), pp.13-54; Raymundo González, Bonó, un intelectual de lospobres, Santo Domingo: Centro de Estudios Sociales P. Juan Montalvo, SJ, 1994.67 Vega (1981).

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agents for selling the crop. It also created a dynamic economic cycle… Because of this, the Cibao was a region… that was enterprising and hardworking.68

Since wealth was much less concentrated than in the south, Cibao people (cibaeños), arguedMoya Pons, were open to nineteenth century liberal ideas. However, the Partido Azul came topower at precisely the moment new industry was to develop in the south with:

a massive immigration of exiled Cubans who came to the country as a result ofthe first Cuban War of Independence… From the outset of the war, many Cubans emigrated to the Dominican Republic, and in a few years some 5,000 exilesreached our country, many of whom had a hard time because they werepersecuted by Benaventura Baez and then by Maria González, whosegovernments wanted to maintain good relations with the Spanish colonialgovernment. As soon as Baez was defeated and the Blues could act freely,Luperón and his political friends gave the best welcome and assistance to allCuban and Puerto Rican patriots who arrived in the country, through Puerto Platain particular, seeking refuge or help to liberate their countries.69

Two important outcomes were that Puerto Plata and Santiago benefited from the influx ofCuban professionals, but Cubans were primarily a source of capital and technology to investin sugar in the south. This sugar expansion coincided with tobacco losing out on overseasmarkets, leading Bonó to lament the “neglect of tobacco and the favour that was shown to sugar, cacao and coffee”.70 Gradually the Partido Azul itself gravitated to sugar and thesouth.

This, then, was the backdrop to Bonó’s strident writing condemning foreigninterference, as evidenced in his oft-quoted 1880 essay‘Privilegiomania’:

that foreign capitalists come and establish four or six sugar cane estates on fertileterrain almost at give-away prices… the owners find themselves surrounded by apopulation that used to have possession of the land, and are now labourers… while I see Santo Domingo’s cane being increasingly protected, I see the blacks ofSabana Grande and Monte Adentro becoming ever poorer, and if this continues,the day is not far distant on which all the small owners who until now have beencitizens will end up being labourers, or rather serfs, and Santo Domingo will be asmall Cuba, or Puerto Rico, or Louisiana.71

He decried land concessions to Cubans to develop the sugar industry, and on them he againlaid blame in his essay ‘Una Suplica’: “this development is due to the Cuban immigration”.72

Two nineteenth-century waves of Cuban migration to the Dominican Republic wereoccasioned by the wars of independence of 1868-78 and 1895-8. Cubans are held to haverevolutionised the Dominican sugar industry in 1875 by bringing steam technology to twomills in the Dominican Republic–La Caridad in San Carlos and La Angelita in San Pedro deMacorís. They were among an influx of Cubans, Puerto Ricans and Americans into sugar, but,it was argued, in comparison with Cuba and Puerto Rico, lack of capital and the

68 Moya Pons (1977), p.5.69 Moya Pons (1977), p.7.70 Moya Pons (1977), p.9.71 Quoted in Rodríguez Demorizi (1964), p.251. This is also developed in Peralta (1977).72 Rodríguez Demorizi (1964), p.253.

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predominance of the peasantry held back any Dominican transformation into a plantationeconomy.73

In the nineteenth century, the central valleys of the Cibao were likened in soils andclimate to the tobacco areas of western Vuelta Abajo, central Villa Clara and Eastern Cubaaround Holguín. While colonial Cuba’s tobacco was considered as superior quality for exportand premium cigar manufacture, by the late 1850s, the newly independent DominicanRepublic occupied tenth place in the world tobacco trade, almost all the tobacco beingexported as leaf to Germany. Cuban émigrés were recorded as primarily merchants andprofessionals, though there was also mention of artisans, especially in cigar rolling inSantiago, Puerto Plata and Santo Domingo. Marte contrasted this with the mass Cubantobacco migration to the US (Tampa, Key West, Ybor City, Mobile and Savannah), quotingfigures of almost 16,000 Cuban émigrés in the years 1873-86, an estimated 40,000 by the endof the century, and 30,000 in tobacco in tobacco alone at the time Cuban independence leaderJosé Martí founded his Cuban Revolutionary Party in Key West in 1892, with the support ofFlorida’s Cuban tobacco workers.74

Martí visited the Dominican Republic in 1892 and 1895, as he did Key West andTampa and Jamaica in 1892 and 1894. He was close to Dominican-born Máximo Gómez,who, after supporting the Dominican annexation of Spain against Haitian occupation andarriving in Cuba as a soldier of Spain, had risen to become a general of Cuba’s 1868-78Liberation Army. Gómez’sreturn to the Dominican Republic coincided with the Cibao elite’sefforts to promote modern agricultural enterprise, and Gómez is on record as havingundertaken a rare attempt to foster a large-scale model tobacco plantations: La Reforma, inthe Monte Cristi region, during the years 1889-96.75 The Montecristi Manifiesto for Cubanindependence was printed in Santiago, and funds were raised for the cause through patrioticclubs in the city, as they were wherever Cubans had settled. It is well documented that Gómezremained in Cuba after the war, through the US occupation of Cuba, and into the early yearsof the fledgling Cuban Republic. The Cuban presence all but disappeared from early-twentieth century accounts of Dominican history. The majority, it is suggested, returned toCuba, and their presence was not to be noted again until post-1959. The sugar / tobaccodichotomy, however, was firmly implanted.

Raymundo González, in his 1994 monograph on Bonó, mapped the importance of alongue durée approach to understanding the resilience of the Cibao peasantry, the significantimpact of Haitian domination being the historical block on the plantation economy andnineteenth-century expansion of the peasant economy. San Miguel took this further to capturehow Dominican scholars and political leaders have fashioned an imagined colonial period outof foundational works, such as Bonó’s nineteenth century progressive romanticism.76 Thus,he argued, in the twentieth century Manuel Arturo Peña Battle and Joaquín Balaguer

73 Roberto Marte, Cuba y la República Dominicana: transición económica en el caribe del siglo XIX, SantoDomingo: Universidad APEC, 1988. See also Emilio Rodríguez Demorizi (ed.), Martí en Santo Domingo,Barcelona: M. Pareja, 1978.74 Evaristo Heres Hernández & Javier López Muñoz, ‘La inmigración cubana y su influencia en Santiago 1868-1908’, EME EME, 5:29, (March-April 1977).75 Similarly, in 1889-92, a Dutch company attempted large-scale planting, based on the Dutch East Indiancolonial experience, in connection with which the British Consul-General commented to the Home Office in1893 that the cost of raising tobacco from Sumatra seed on Dominican soil was too high to allow remunerativespeculation.76 Pedro L. San Miguel, La isla imaginada: historia, identidad y utopía en La Espanola, San Juan & SantoDomingo: Editorial Isla Negra/Ediciones Librería La Trinitaria, 1997.

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epitomised the paroxism in the relationship between historiography and power under Trujilloas‘persuasive fiction’in their elitistist and racist interpretations of the tragic loss of a goldenage and bifurcation of the island.77 Historian and ephemeral Dominican President Juan Boschprovided a progressive, yet still tragic, analysis of a deformed Dominican ‘arrítmia histórica’ – that is, of Dominican history being ‘out of rhythm’, ‘off-beat’, or ‘out of sinc’ with mainstream Caribbean history, seen as that of the plantation.78

Are the Dominican Republic and Dominican tobacco now ‘in sinc’ with history? Thecountry has clearly entered the contemporary mainstream of Caribbean development, not withthe plantation but with FTZs, in the context of which it has risen to cigar prominence. If the‘exceptionalism’ has gone, what, too, of the peasantry and ‘democratic tobacco’?

I began this paper with the León Jimenes story, and I wish to end by way of that story.In the peak year of 1997, the Santiago daily Listin Diario brought out a new magazine,Cigarro. Its second issue featured congratulatory letters to the editor from José León andothers for a publication that drew attention to the fact that:

In this day and age of real globalisation and world integration, in which thecomparative advantages of each nation need to be strongly promoted, theDominican Republic must show the world that it is we who offer the best beaches,the best sun, the best merengue, and above all, the best cigar in the world.79

In 2000, the Dominican government released a stamp depicting a cigar, a tobacco leaf and thewords La Tierra del Tobacco (The Land of Tobacco). David Savona, who has written featurearticles on Dominican tobacco since the 1990s for Cigar Aficionado, concluded in 2004:

It’s hard to imagine a cigar world without the Dominican Republic, but thecountry hasn’t been a market leader for long. Although its oldest cigarmaker, LaAurora S.A. has been in business for a century, most of the cigars it made in thepast were for local consumption. In the 1970s the first free trade zones opened inthe country, welcoming companies that would make cigars strictly for export. Ittook nearly a decade for the Dominican Republic to overtake the Canary Islandsand Jamaica to become the leading cigar producer for the United States. Theincreases in cigar production here have been extraordinary.80

In the early 1990s, cigars were a secondary business for the León family. Then, in 1993, at thestart of the boom, Guillermo León was named executive vice president of La Aurora S.A.Charged with developing the US market, dividing his time between Santiago and the US, hebecame a stalwart member of ProCigar, the Dominican cigar association. Asked about Cubain a feature for Cigar Aficionado, his response was upbeat:

People already prefer our cigars the way they are. The brands are alreadyestablished. I can’t say that using Cuban tobacco or whatever would never

77 Manuel Arturo Peña Battle, Ensayos históricos, Santo Domingo: Fundación Pena Battle, 1988; JoaquínBalaguer, La realidad dominicana, Buenos Aires: Imprenta Ferrari Hermanos, 1947.78 Juan Bosch, Composición social dominicana. Historia e interpretación, Santo Domingo: Alfa y Omega, 1979[1970].79 Cigarro, magazine of Listín Diario, no.2, 24 (October 1997), p. 4.80 David Savona, ‘Dominican Dominance’, Cigar Aficionado (May/June 2004).

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happen. I think Cuba has good tobacco. If some day that is what the consumerasks for, why not? There are people that like tobacco from Nicaragua, Hondurasor Indonesia. Cuba is a good producer of tobacco, so why not contemplate all thepossibilities. To speculate about whether we would create a factory in Cuba, Idoubt it. First of all, our roots aren’t Cuban; we are very traditional and very Dominican, and we have defended our national pride to the end. When theDominican market was not appealing to anyone, we maintained it. Even when wehad the chance to increase our profit margin by moving the production tosomewhere else, we maintained our tradition here, which is to give the people thecigars they wanted. We have good relationships with people from Havana. Theyhave visited us at La Aurora. But that’s it.81

León Jimenes is by far the most prominent Dominican cigar company of the twenty-firstcentury, but its major competitors Tabalacera A. Fuente and Tabacalera de García create adifferent scenario as regards Cuba. The June 2007 issue of Cigar Aficionado, titled ‘Cuba Tomorrow’, featured articles on Cuba written by leading Cuban and Cuban-Americanpolitical figures and analysts in Cuba and the United States, interspersed with an abundanceof page and double-page ads for Dominican-Cuban cigars, taken out by Tabacalera García(‘makers of the finest Dominican cigars’, including Montecristo, Romeo y Julieta, Trinidad, Don Diego, Ashton, Vega Fina, La Aroma de Cuba), as well as General Cigar (Dunhill, VivaBolívar, Macanudo), Arturo Fuente, Oliva, Toraño, and Pérez-Carrillo (La Gloria Cubana).

The success story of the cigar companies is undeniable. Yet the questions remain. Atwhat cost Dominican success? What of the Dominican model when the dispossessed havepoured out of the countryside and into the cities of Santiago, Santo Domingo and New York?Where is the Bonó vision for the twenty-first century? And what will happen when the USembargo on Cuba ends?

81 Gordon Mott,‘An Interview with Guillermo León: President, León Jimenes Cigars’, Cigar Aficionado(July/August 1998)

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SSeerriieess EEddiittoorr:: DDrr JJoonnaatthhaann CCuurrrryy--MMaacchhaaddoo ((LLMMUU))PPrroojjeecctt DDiirreeccttoorrss:: DDrr SSaannddiipp HHaazzaarreeeessiinngghh ((OOUU)) aanndd PPrrooff.. JJeeaann SSttuubbbbss ((LLMMUU))

CCoommmmooddiittiieess ooff EEmmppiirree iiss aa jjooiinntt rreesseeaarrcchh ccoollllaabboorraattiioonn bbeettwweeeenn tthhee OOppeennUUnniivveerrssiittyy''ss FFeerrgguussoonn CCeennttrree ffoorr AAffrriiccaann aanndd AAssiiaann SSttuuddiieess aanndd LLoonnddoonnMMeettrrooppoolliittaann UUnniivveerrssiittyy''ss CCaarriibbbbeeaann SSttuuddiieess CCeennttrree.. TThheessee ttwwoo iinnssttiittuuttiioonnss

ffoorrmm tthhee nnuucclleeuuss ooff aa ggrroowwiinngg iinntteerrnnaattiioonnaall nneettwwoorrkk ooff rreesseeaarrcchheerrss aannddrreesseeaarrcchh cceennttrreess..

TThhee mmuuttuuaallllyy rreeiinnffoorrcciinngg rreellaattiioonnsshhiipp bbeettwweeeenn ‘‘ccoommmmooddiittiieess’’aanndd ‘‘eemmppiirreess’’hhaass lloonngg bbeeeennrreeccooggnniisseedd.. OOvveerr tthhee llaasstt ssiixx cceennttuurriieess tthhee qquueesstt ffoorr pprrooffiittss hhaass ddrriivveenn iimmppeerriiaall eexxppaannssiioonn,,

wwiitthh tthhee gglloobbaall ttrraaddee iinn ccoommmmooddiittiieess ffuueelllliinngg tthhee oonnggooiinngg iinndduussttrriiaall rreevvoolluuttiioonn.. TThheessee‘ ‘ccoommmmooddiittiieess ooff eemmppiirree’’,, wwhhiicchh bbeeccaammee ttrraannssnnaattiioonnaallllyy mmoobbiilliisseedd iinn eevveerr llaarrggeerr qquuaannttiittiieess,,iinncclluuddeedd ffooooddssttuuffffss ((wwhheeaatt,, rriiccee,, bbaannaannaass));; iinndduussttrriiaall ccrrooppss ((ccoottttoonn,, rruubbbbeerr,, lliinnsseeeedd aanndd

ppaallmm ooiillss));; ssttiimmuullaannttss ((ssuuggaarr,, tteeaa,, ccooffffeeee,, ccooccooaa,, ttoobbaaccccoo aanndd ooppiiuumm));; aanndd oorreess ((ttiinn,,ccooppppeerr,, ggoolldd,, ddiiaammoonnddss)).. TThheeiirr eexxppaannddeedd pprroodduuccttiioonn aanndd gglloobbaall mmoovveemmeennttss bbrroouugghhtt vvaasstt

ssppaattiiaall,, ssoocciiaall,, eeccoonnoommiicc aanndd ccuullttuurraall cchhaannggeess ttoo bbootthh mmeettrrooppoolleess aanndd ccoolloonniieess..

IInn tthhee CCoommmmooddiittiieess ooff EEmmppiirree pprroojjeecctt wwee eexxpplloorree tthhee nneettwwoorrkkss tthhrroouugghh wwhhiicchh ssuucchhccoommmmooddiittiieess cciirrccuullaatteedd wwiitthhiinn,, aanndd iinn tthhee ssppaacceess bbeettwweeeenn,, eemmppiirreess.. WWee aarree ppaarrttiiccuullaarrllyy

aatttteennttiivvee ttoo llooccaall pprroocceesssseess ––oorriiggiinnaattiinngg iinn AAffrriiccaa,, AAssiiaa,, tthhee CCaarriibbbbeeaann aanndd LLaattiinn AAmmeerriiccaa ––wwhhiicchh ssiiggnniiffiiccaannttllyy iinnfflluueenncceedd tthhee oouuttccoommee ooff tthhee eennccoouunntteerr bbeettwweeeenn tthhee wwoorrlldd eeccoonnoommyy

aanndd rreeggiioonnaall ssoocciieettiieess,, ddooiinngg ssoo tthhrroouugghh aa ccoommppaarraattiivvee aapppprrooaacchh tthhaatt eexxpplloorreess tthheeeexxppeerriieenncceess ooff ppeeoopplleess ssuubbjjeecctteedd ttoo ddiiffffeerreenntt iimmppeerriiaall hheeggeemmoonniieess..

TThhee ffoolllloowwiinngg kkeeyy rreesseeaarrcchh qquueessttiioonnss iinnffoorrmm tthhee wwoorrkk ooff pprroojjeecctt::

11)) TThhee nneettwwoorrkkss tthhrroouugghh wwhhiicchh ccoommmmooddiittiieess wweerree pprroodduucceedd aanndd cciirrccuullaatteedd wwiitthhiinn,,bbeettwweeeenn aanndd bbeeyyoonndd eemmppiirreess;;

22)) TThhee iinntteerrlliinnkkiinngg ‘‘ssyysstteemmss’’((ppoolliittiiccaall--mmiilliittaarryy,, aaggrriiccuullttuurraall llaabboouurr,, ccoommmmeerrcciiaall,, mmaarriittiimmee,,iinndduussttrriiaall pprroodduuccttiioonn,, ssoocciiaall ccoommmmuunniiccaattiioonn,, tteecchhnnoollooggiiccaall kknnoowwlleeddggee)) tthhaatt wweerreetthheemmsseellvveess eevvoollvviinngg dduurriinngg tthhee ccoolloonniiaall ppeerriioodd,, aanndd tthhrroouugghh wwhhiicchh tthheessee ccoommmmooddiittyynneettwwoorrkkss ffuunnccttiioonneedd;;

33)) TThhee iimmppaacctt ooff aaggeennttss iinn tthhee ppeerriipphheerryy oonn tthhee eessttaabblliisshhmmeenntt aanndd ddeevveellooppmmeenntt ooffccoommmmooddiittyy nneettwwoorrkkss:: aass iinnssttiiggaattoorrss aanndd pprroommootteerrss;; tthhrroouugghh tthheeiirr ssoocciiaall,, ccuullttuurraall aannddtteecchhnnoollooggiiccaall rreessiissttaannccee;; oorr tthhrroouugghh tthhee pprroodduuccttiioonn ooff aannttii--ccoommmmooddiittiieess;;

44)) TThhee iimmppaacctt ooff ccoommmmooddiittyy cciirrccuullaattiioonn bbootthh oonn tthhee ppeerriipphheerryy,, aanndd oonn tthhee eeccoonnoommiicc,,ssoocciiaall aanndd ccuullttuurraall lliiffee ooff tthhee mmeettrrooppoolleess;;

55)) TThhee iinntteerrrrooggaattiioonn ooff tthhee ccoonncceepptt ooff ‘‘gglloobbaalliissaattiioonn’’tthhrroouugghh tthhee ssttuuddyy ooff tthhee hhiissttoorriiccaallmmoovveemmeenntt aanndd iimmppaacctt ooff ccoommmmooddiittiieess..

wwwwww..ooppeenn..aacc..uukk//AArrttss//ffeerrgguussoonn--cceennttrree//ccoommmmooddiittiieess--ooff--eemmppiirree//iinnddeexx

TThhee FFeerrgguussoonn CCeennttrree ffoorrAAffrriiccaann aanndd AAssiiaann SSttuuddiieess,,TThhee OOppeenn UUnniivveerrssiittyy,,WWaallttoonn HHaallll,,MMiillttoonn KKeeyynneess MMKK77 66AAAA

CCaarriibbbbeeaann SSttuuddiieess CCeennttrree,,LLoonnddoonn MMeettrrooppoolliittaann UUnniivveerrssiittyy,,

NNoorrtthh CCaammppuuss,,116666--222200 HHoolllloowwaayy RRooaadd,,

LLoonnddoonn NN77 88DDBB